History of English Literature, Volume 3: From the Metaphysicals to the Romantics 1789971764, 9781789971767

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History of English Literature

History of English Literature Volume 3

From the Metaphysicals to the Romantics Franco Marucci Translated from the Italian by Arthur L. Whellens

PETER LANG

Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • New York • Wien

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche National-bibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Marucci, Franco, 1949- author. Title: From the Metaphysicals to the Romantics / Franco Marucci. Description: Oxford ; New York : Peter Lang, [2018] | Series: History of English literature ; Volume 3 | Translation of Dal 1625 al 1832, volume 1, tome 2 of Storia della letteratura inglese. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018011220 | ISBN 9783034322300 (alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: English literature--History and criticism. Classification: LCC PR97 .M366 2018 | DDC 820.9--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018011220 Originally published in Italian as Storia della letteratura inglese dal 1625 al 1832 – Dai metafisici ai romantici by Casa Editrice Le Lettere (2018).

Cover image: Joseph Nickolls, Pope’s Villa, Twickenham (c. 1755). Cover design by Brian Melville. ISBN 978-1-78997-176-7 (print) • ISBN 978-1-78874-226-9 (ePDF) ISBN 978-1-78874-227-6 (ePub) • ISBN 978-1-78874-228-3 (mobi) © Peter Lang AG 2018 Published by Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers, 52 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3LU, United Kingdom [email protected], www.peterlang.com Franco Marucci has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this Work. All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed. Printed in Germany

Contents List of abbreviations

xi/I

Part I

Jacobean, Caroline and Republican Poetry and Prose

1/I

§ 1. The Stuart century

3/I

  2. Literary genres up to the Restoration

19/I

  3. The Spenserians

28/I

  4. Wither

30/I

  5. William Browne

32/I

  6. Drummond of Hawthornden

34/I

  7. The Fletchers

37/I

  8. Suckling

40/I

  9. Lovelace

44/I

  10. Carew

47/I

  11. Herrick

53/I

  12–14. Herbert

60/I

§ 12. The quintessence of Anglican spirituality, p. 60/I. § 13. The Temple. The builder of temples, p. 66/I. § 14. A Priest to the Temple. A vicar’s prayer book, p. 70/I.

  15. Herbert of Cherbury

72/I

vi/I

§§ 16–17. Crashaw

74/I

§ 16. The English apotheosis of continental Baroque, p. 74/I. § 17. Cupid desensualized, p. 78/I.

  18. Vaughan

84/I

  19–20. Traherne

90/I

§ 19. A foretaste of Paradise, p. 90/I. § 20. Centuries of Meditations, p. 95/I.

  21. Quarles

96/I

  22. King

98/I

  23. Cowley

100/I

  24. Cleveland

104/I

  25–26. Marvell

106/I

§ 25. Cromwell’s regime. Justification and nostalgia, p. 106/I. § 26. Return to Eden, p. 115/I.

  27. Waller

122/I

  28. Denham

125/I

  29. The homilists. Andrewes, Taylor

126/I

  30. The Authorized Version 

129/I

  31–39. Milton 

131/I

§ 31. The uncreated idiom, p. 131/I. § 32. Early works, p. 139/I. § 33. Comus, p. 145/I. § 34. The enslaved voice, p. 146/I.

vii/I

§§ 35–37. Paradise Lost (§ 35. Genesis, allegory and theology of the poem, p. 151/I. § 36. Satan’s dynamism and God’s response, p. 161. § 37. Man’s redemption, p. 163/I). § 38. Paradise Regained. The new Adam, p. 167/I. § 39. Samson Agonistes, p. 169/I.

§ 40. Minor poets up to 1660

171/I

  41. Bacon

173/I

  42. Burton

179/I

  43. Thomas Browne

187/I

  44. Other prose writers

192/I

Part II

The Restoration

197/I

  45. Restoration literature

199/I

  46. The re-opening of the theatres

201/I

  47–51. Dryden

205/I

§ 47. The re-consecration of Stuart civilization, p. 205/I. § 48. Early poetry. Elegiac, encomiastic, celebrative, p. 215/I. § 49. The comedies, p. 217/I. § 50. Genesis, development and limits of Dryden’s heroic tragedy, p.  221 /I . § 51. Satirical and theological poems, p. 226/I.

  52. Lee

232/I

  53. Otway

235/I

  54. Etherege

241/I

  55. Wycherley

247/I

viii/I

§ 56. Congreve

256/I

  57–58. Shadwell

265/I

§ 57. Farces against foreign fads, p. 265/I. § 58. The Libertine, p. 270/I.

  59. Vanbrugh

275/I

  60. Farquhar

280/I

  61. Rochester

285/I

  62. Samuel Butler

290/I

  63. Oldham 

296/I

  64. Restoration historians. Clarendon, Burnet

299/I

  65. Pepys

302/I

  66. Evelyn

307/I

  67. Temple

311/I

  68. Hobbes, Locke 

313/I

  69–70. Bunyan

318/I

§ 69. The Pilgrim’s Progress, p. 318/I. § 70. Other works on the contest between God and the devil, p. 323/I.

  71. Early feminism

326/I

Part III

The Augustan Age

337/I

  72. England from the Glorious Revolution to 1745 

339/I



ix/I

§ 73. The Enlightenment in England

343/I

  74–76. Pope

354/I

§ 74. A ‘re-maker’ of genius, p. 354/I. § 75. Poetic experiments up to the Homeric translations, p. 359/I. § 76. Hordes of disorder, p. 366/I.

  77. Prior

371/I

  78. Gay

376/I

  79. Dennis

384/I

  80. Arbuthnot

385/I

  81. Bolingbroke

387/I

  82–88. Defoe

389/I

§ 82. The growth of the novelist, p. 389/I. § 83. Robinson Crusoe. Ambition, initiative and divine approval of the entrepreneur, p. 397/I. § 84. Captain Singleton, p. 403/I. § 85. Moll Flanders. Moral balancing acts in a monetized society, p. 404/I. § 86. A Journal of the Plague Year, p. 407/I. § 87. Colonel Jack, p. 409/I. § 88. Roxana. A more polished portrait, p. 411/I.

  89–95. Swift

414/I

§ 89. Anathema of the monster and pitfalls of Swiftian irony, p. 414/I. § 90. Satires against ‘enthusiasm’, p. 422/I. § 91. Paradigmatic pamphlets, p. 424/I. §§ 92–93. Gulliver’s Travels (§ 92. Travel literature revisited, p. 428/I. § 93. The enigma of Part IV, p. 434). § 94. Journal to Stella, p. 441/I. § 95. Swift the poet, p. 442/I.

  96. Addison

444/I

x/I

§§ 97–98. Steele

450/I

§ 97. Apostle to the gentiles, p. 450/I. § 98. The newspaper man, p. 456/I.

  99. Shaftesbury

458/I

  100. Berkeley

459/I

  101. Joseph Butler

463/I

  102. Mandeville

465/I

  103. Law

468/I

  104. Other deists

469/I

  105. Lady Winchilsea

470/I

  106–107. Thomson

473/I

§ 106. The theophany of nature, p. 473/I. § 107. The Castle of Indolence. England aroused from sloth, p. 481/I.

  108. Dyer

484/I

  109. Young

487/I

  110. Minor anti-Popian poets 

493/I

The Index of names and Thematic index for Volume 3 can be found at the end of Book 2.

xi/II 

Part IV

The Eighteenth Century Comes of Age

1/II

§ 111. Britain from 1745 to 1789

3/II

  112. The eighteenth century comes of age

6/II

  113–115. Goldsmith

10/II

§ 113. Patriarchal society: nostalgia and defence, p. 10/II. § 114. The Vicar of Wakefield, p. 17/II. § 115. The plays. Psychosocial mechanisms unmasked and exorcized, p. 20/II.

  116–120. Richardson

25/II

§ 116. Case histories and objectives of the seduction triptych, p. 25/II. §§ 117–118. Pamela (§ 117. Letter-mad maidservant redeems rake, p. 32/II. § 118. Degenerate nobility reformed from below, p. 39/II). § 119. Clarissa, p. 43/II. § 120. Sir Charles Grandison, p. 48/II.

  121–124. Fielding

53/II

§ 121. Richardson parodied, p. 53/II. § 122. Jonathan Wild, p. 62/II. § 123. Tom Jones. A justified sinner, p. 63/II. § 124. Amelia, p. 71/II.

  125–126. Smollett

76/II

§ 125. Transplant and growth of the English picaresque, p. 76/ II. § 126. Humphry Clinker. Turning towards the extravaganza, p. 84/II.

  127–128. Sterne

93/II

§ 127. Tristram Shandy, or concerning relations, p. 93/II. § 128. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, p. 105/II.

xii/II 

§ 129. Gray

112/II

  130. William Collins

121/II

  131. Churchill

126/II

  132–133. Johnson

128/II

§ 132. Rise and fall of the artist as creator, p. 128/II. § 133. The three monuments to knowledge, p. 136/II.

  134. Boswell

143/II

  135. Wilkes, Junius 

145/II

  136. Letter-writers 

147/II

  137. Hume

150/II

  138. Robertson

153/II

  139. Gibbon

154/II

  140. Mid-eighteenth-century drama

158/II

  141. Sheridan

162/II

  142. Walpole

168/II

  143. Radcliffe

175/II

  144. Beckford

182/II

  145. Other exponents of the novel of terror

186/II



xiii/II

  146. Burke

193/II

§ 147. Macpherson

197/II

  148. Percy and the Reliques of English Poetry

200/II

  149. Chatterton

202/II

  150. Cowper

205/II

  151. Smart

211/II

  152. Crabbe

213/II

  153. Wesley and Methodism

218/II

  154. The Scottish awakening

219/II

  155. Hogg

222/II

  156. Mackenzie

227/II

Part V

Romanticism229/II   157. From the Napoleonic wars to the Age of Equipoise

231/II

  158. English Romanticism

236/II

  159. Burney

246/II

  160–165. Austen

252/II

xiv/II   § 160. Janeites and Austenophobes, p. 252. § 161. Gothic vaccination, p. 259/II. § 162. Mansfield Park. A thoughtful diagnosis of modern youth, p. 266/II. § 163. Emma. The masochism of match-making, p. 270/II. § 164. Persuasion, p. 272/II. § 165. Juvenilia and fragments, p. 273/II.

§ 166. Edgeworth

275/II

  167. Galt

280/II

  168. Other late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury novelists

283/II

  169. Paine

287/II

  170. Godwin

288/II

  171. Mary Wollstonecraft

293/II

  172. Burns

296/II

  173–177. Blake

304/II

§ 173. The first English multi-media artist, p. 304/II. § 174. Biography and intellectual growth, p. 312/II. § 175. The contrary states of the human soul, p. 319/II. § 176. The Satanic verses, p. 323/II. § 177. The Prophetic Books, p. 329/II.

  178–182. Wordsworth § 178. The dialogue of the soul with itself in the presence of nature, p. 333/II. § 179. The ‘loco-descriptive poems’, p. 341/II. § 180. Lyrical Ballads, p. 342/II. § 181. The major phase, p. 347/II. § 182. The Prelude, p. 352/II.

333/II

xv/II 

  183–188. Coleridge

357/II

§ 183. From the epistemic context to symbolic recreation, p. 357/II. § 184. Conversation pieces, p. 363/II. §§ 185–187. The demonic triptych (§ 185. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, p. 366/II. § 186. Kubla Khan, p. 372/II. § 187. Christabel, p. 375/ II). § 188. Biographia Literaria and Shakespearean criticism, p. 377/II.

§§ 189–194. Shelley

382/II

§ 189. Poetry to break the chains of the world, p. 382/II. § 190. Action and introspection in the early Shelley, p. 391/II. § 191. Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci, p. 396/II. § 192. Other ‘Italian’ poems, p. 401/II. § 193. The Triumph of Life. A critical and phantasmagoric diagnosis of the Enlightenment, p. 407/II. § 194/II. A Defence of Poetry, p. 410/II.

  195–199. Keats

413/II

§ 195. The uncertain plenitude of myth, p. 413/II. § 196. Endymion and other oneiric rhapsodies, p. 422/II. § 197. The two Hyperions, p. 430/II. § 198. Poems of death-bearing and life-bringing love, p. 432/II. § 199. The great odes, p. 437/II.

  200–205. Byron

445/II

§  200. Phases and forms of Byron’s self-fashioning, p. 445. § 201. The anathema of Romanticism, p. 453/II. § 202. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. The grand tour of an eccentric Englishman, p. 457. § 203. Oriental tales, p. 460/II. § 204. Disputes and dilemmas in the dramas, p. 465/II. § 205. Don Juan. Mimesis and estrangement of Donjuanism, p. 471/II.

  206–211. Scott

481/II

xvi/II  §  206. Range and critical fortunes of Scott’s fiction, p.  481/II. §  207. The poetry, p.  490/II. §§  208–209. The Scottish historical novels (§  208. The founding trilogy, p.  493/II. §  209. The last Jacobite, p.  501/ II.). §  210. Ivanhoe, p.  508/II. §  211. The last phase, p. 512.

   212. Mary Shelley

522/II

  213. Polidori

527/II

  214. Southey

529/II

§ 215. Landor

536/II

  216. Campbell

543/II

  217. Rogers

545/II

  218. Moore

546/II

  219. Clare

550/II

  220. Beddoes, Darley

554/II

  221. Keble

557/II

  222. Hemans, L. E. L.

559/II

  223. Humorous poets

564/II

  224. Lamb

567/II

  225. De Quincey

576/II

  226. Hazlitt

583/II



xvii/II

  227. Smith

589/II

  228. Hunt

589/II

  229. Peacock

596/II

  230. Cobbett

602/II

  231. Romantic drama

604/II

Index of names

607/II

Thematic index

635/II

Abbreviations W. Allen, The English Novel, Harmondsworth 1991 (1st edn London 1954). ASH M. Ashley, England in the Seventeenth Century (1603–1714), Harmondsworth 1952. BAUGH A Literary History of England, ed. A. C. Baugh, 4 vols, London 1967. CHI The Cambridge History of English Literature, 14 vols, Cambridge 1907, repr. 1949. CLA M. Praz, Cronache letterarie anglosassoni, 4 vols, Roma 1951 and 1966. CRHE The Critical Heritage, anthologies of criticism on single authors, with editors, and date and place of publication as stated in the bibliographies. DAI D. Daiches, A Critical History of English Literature, 2 vols, New York 1960. DEA S. Deane, A Short History of Irish Literature, London 1986. DEE B. Dobrée, The Early Eighteenth Century 1700–1740: Swift, Defoe, and Pope, vol. VII of The Oxford History of English Literature, ed. F. P. Wilson and B. Dobrée, Oxford 1990 (1st edn 1959). ESE T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, London 1963 (1st edn 1932). GGM S. M. Gilbert and S. Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, New Haven, CT and London 1984. GSM H. J. C. Grierson and J. C. Smith, A Critical History of English Poetry, London 1956. HWP B. Russell, History of Western Philosophy, London 1964 (1st edn 1946). IDM F. Marucci, L’inchiostro del mago. Saggi di letteratura inglese dell’Ottocento, Pisa 2009. IZZ C. Izzo, Storia della letteratura inglese, 2 vols, Milano 1961, 1963. AEN

xx/I Abbreviations

JEL JLI LAM MAR MIT MVO OCE PGU PHE PLE PLU PMI PMLA PRA PSL REL SAI

I. Jack, English Literature 1815–1832, vol. X of The Oxford History of English Literature, ed. F. P. Wilson and B. Dobrée, Oxford 1963. S. Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. A. Waugh, 2 vols, London 1979. G. Tomasi di Lampedusa, Letteratura inglese, 2 vols, Milano 1990–1991. Storia della civiltà letteraria inglese, ed. F. Marenco, 4 vols, Torino 1996. L. Mittner, Storia della letteratura tedesca, 3 vols in 4 tomes, Torino 1964–1977. F. Marucci, ‘A Victorian Oxymoron: The “Mastering” and “Merciful God”’, in Hopkins: Tradition and Innovation, ed. P. Bottalla, G. Marra and F. Marucci, Ravenna 1991, 191–206. G. Orwell, Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, ed. S. Orwell and I. Angus, 4 vols, Harmondsworth 1970. The Pelican Guide to English Literature, ed. B. Ford, 7 vols, Harmondsworth 1968. M. Praz, The Hero in Eclipse in Victorian Fiction, Eng. trans., London 1969 (1st Italian edn Firenze 1952). M. Pagnini, Letteratura e ermeneutica, Firenze 2002. J. H. Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century, Harmondsworth 1950. M. Praz, Machiavelli in Inghilterra e altri saggi sui rapporti letterari anglo-italiani, Firenze 1962. Publications of the Modern Language Association of America. M. Praz, The Romantic Agony, Eng. trans., London 1956 (1st Italian edn Firenze 1930). M. Praz, Storia della letteratura inglese, Firenze 1968. W. L. Renwick, English Literature 1789–1815, vol. IX of The Oxford History of English Literature, ed. F. P. Wilson and B. Dobrée, Oxford 1976 (1st edn 1963). G. Saintsbury, A Short History of English Literature, London 1948 (1st edn 1898).

xxi/I

Abbreviations

SDR SEC SEL SES SSI TAI TCR TLS WATT WHM

G. Sertoli, I due Robinson e altri saggi sulla letteratura inglese del Settecento, Genova 2014. J. Sambrook, The Eighteenth Century: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1700–1789, London 1986. J. Sutherland, English Literature of the Late Seventeenth Century, vol. VIII of The Oxford History of English Literature, ed. B. Dobrée and N. Davis, Oxford 1969. J. L. Styan, The English Stage: A History of Drama and Performance, Cambridge 1996. M. Praz, Studi e svaghi inglesi, 2 vols, Milano 1983 (1st edn 1937). H. A. Taine, History of English Literature, Eng. trans., 4 vols, London 1920 (1st French edn 1864). V. Woolf, The Common Reader, First Series, Harmondsworth 1938 (1st edn London 1925), Second Series, London 1935 (1st edn London 1932). The Times Literary Supplement. I. Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, Harmondsworth 1977 (1st edn London 1957). R. Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism 1750–1950, 8 vols, New Haven, CT 1955–1992.

Volumes of the present work will be cited as follows: Volume 1 Volume 2 Volume 4 Volume 5 Volume 6 Volume 7 Volume 8

F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 1, Oxford 2018. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 2, Oxford 2018. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 4, Oxford 2019. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 5, Oxford 2019. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 6, Oxford 2019. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 7, Oxford 2019. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 8, Oxford 2019.

Note. Except for the above abbreviations, full publication information of cited works will be found in the bibliography for each author.

Part I 

Jacobean, Caroline and Republican Poetry and Prose

§ 1. The Stuart century The seventeenth century – in England and more in general in Europe – shows clearly, if indeed proof were needed, that political, civil, cultural, and, consequently, literary history, is inextricably tied up with religion, which in turn becomes a ‘political subject’.1 The key to understanding aright the events of the century is to be found in the clash of confessional positions, in differing versions of the Christian life, and even in the debate on the importance of ritual and the hierarchical structure of the Church; in other words, in the acceptance or refusal of religion as the foundation of the state. This is also the century in which England becomes a parliamentary monarchy, or rather, more parliamentary, and produces a judicial system and an evolutionary process of decentralization which inverts the arrogant absolutism of the continental courts. The seeds of two-party politics are sown, and the controversy over the divine right of kings fades into the distance.2 From this time on, the English political system will become an exportable model championed by her libertarian thinkers. In 1660 and in 1685, a return to the past was a tangible threat, but by then the reins of powers were firmly in the hands of Parliament, and the king was forced to bow to its commands. 2. During the century, as may be seen in a statistical table drawn up in 1688 by the citizen Gregory King, the population of England had reached five and a half million even taking into account the plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London the following year (among the consequences of the Great Fire were innovative building norms, the elimination of straw, replaced by carpets as a covering for floors, and the extensive use of bricks for walls). Demographic increase was limited by emigration; throughout the century colonization acted as a safety valve against Dissenters. Patriotic

1

2

Puritanism began as a religious movement but soon took on party political identity: the congregations of Bible readings in chapels were led by leaders of the elite ‘like Communist Party cells in the twentieth century’ (138 of L. Stone’s book, quoted below in n. 8). The last advocate of divine right after the Restoration was Sir Robert Filmer (1588– 1653) in Patriarcha, published posthumously in 1680. It was rebutted by Algernon Sidney (1622–1683) and, above all, by Hobbes (§ 68.1 and ASH, 162–3).

4/I Part I  Jacobean, Caroline and Republican Poetry and Prose

historians played down the suffering of those who embarked upon the long journey to America: any who did not feel at their ease in the home country could always find fame and fortune in the colonies, and could pray whatever way they liked, protected by the English flag. Quite apart from the religious motivation – Puritan proselytism – the Dissenters sailed in the hope of finding affordable land and opportunities for employment. The colonists indeed quickly exported models of local self-government, thus developing a federal system with ever weaker ties with the mother country. In the course of the century the English seized colonies from Spain and the Low Countries, and trade with the Indies made it necessary to increase the size of the merchant fleet. Thanks to the abolition of monopolies, spices were imported, along with silk, porcelain, tea and coffee, which changed the way of living of the middle classes. Another favourite theme of the patriotic historian was social responsibility. A sort of direct chain of transmission connected the King’s Privy Council in London with local authorities, whose job it was to look after the poor and the unemployed. This constituted a kind of welfare state ante litteram, which pre-empted and eliminated the possible causes justifying a real revolution, so that when a Glorious Rebellion did come it was a watered down version of what was to take place in France a century later. A comparison is often made between the Wars of the Roses and the Civil War, but such a parallel is misleading: the latter was fought for reasons that were less self-serving and materialistic, and more idealistic. 3. James I (1601–1625), who for a good half of his life sat on the throne of Scotland, proved to be a scholar king second only to Alfred the Great. As a ruler he was precociously Machiavellian. The son of Mary Stuart and her second husband, Lord Darnley, he was tutored by the classicist Buchanan, and by the time he was twenty-two had written and published a treatise on poetry.3 In 1597 he published Demonologie and in 1604 A Counterblaste to Tobacco (anonymously). His conception of the divine right of kings was put forward in two books published before the end of the century. James, who at the age of twelve laid claim to the throne of Scotland, developed a 3

Which deserves to be studied and placed alongside the various English treatises of aesthetics published at the end of the sixteenth century.

§ 1. The Stuart century

5/I

strategy of not making enemies; he stood aloof, equidistant from Catholics (even when conspiracies were discovered, as in 1589) and from Presbyterians, opting, however, for the latter when Catholic power became a threat. It is strange, therefore, that a king so precociously skilled and experienced – though ruler only, at the time, of a ‘minor’ country like Scotland – should find himself not up to the task of ruling England.4 The tug of war between absolutism and democracy began when James ceased to convene Parliament and relied more and more on the adventurer George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham.5 Denied funds by Parliament, he borrowed heavily, doubling the royal debt, and was compelled, in the end, with disastrous results, to resort to dubious stratagems, like the selling of monopolies. These same financial straits caused him to leave the German Puritans to their fate, thus arousing suspicions of harbouring Catholic sympathies. Again for reasons of expediency, he pandered to Spain by having Ralegh executed. Ralegh had fallen into a trap laid by the Spanish ambassador, Gondomar, in an affair that caused a stir and provided the raw material for a play by Middleton.6 James had managed to silence the Scottish assemblies, but was unable to place the English Parliament under similar restraint. This was partly because of his weakness for his favourites. His ecclesiastical policy was summed up in the motto: ‘No bishop, no king’. Towards the Puritans he assumed a position of defiance but never brought them to heel. He harried

4 5 6

For his favouritism towards fellow Scots while he was king of England, see what happened to the playwright Marston (Volume 1, § 107.1 n. 12). Buckingham replaced Robert Carr, Duke of Somerset, as favourite when the latter became embroiled in indiscreet marital affairs. Volume 1, § 136. It was Gondomar who plotted for the king’s son, the future Charles II, to marry the Infanta of Spain. Parliament protested, but nonetheless Charles travelled to Madrid in 1623 to decide whether or not to contract the marriage. Nothing came of it. The ‘Overbury affair’ was a scandal with far-reaching consequences: Frances Howard, Countess of Essex, divorced from her husband, Robert Devereux, in order to marry Robert Carr, on the grounds that the marriage had not been consummated; a panel of ladies was formed to carry out a gynaecological examination (it is possible that some other woman took the place of the Countess). In 1616 Thomas Overbury, who had opposed the divorce, was murdered; the newlyweds were tried and found guilty, but subsequently pardoned by the king.

6/I Part I  Jacobean, Caroline and Republican Poetry and Prose

them into exile or simply had them eliminated. As to the Catholics, he fined and persecuted them from the very start of his reign. The so-called Gunpowder Plot, organized by the Jesuits, discovered and neutralized in 1605, was a result of this repressive anti-Catholic policy. 4. Charles I, second son of James I, was a late child, and anything but precocious in learning to walk. He became an excellent horseman, but was plagued by a stammer throughout his life. He loved Italian painting and was a patron of the arts. A devoted husband, he became the subject of John Gauden’s Eikon Basilike, a text which was said to be the king’s memorial in articulo mortis, and helped to create the reputation of Charles the martyr. Milton’s pamphlet, Eikonoklastes, is a violent riposte to Gauden’s moving portrait of the dead king.7 Charles’s wife outlived him, and his sons were to become Charles II and James II. His dynasty covers the whole of the seventeenth century, and beyond, if we consider that, after 1688 and for three more decades, the Old Pretender, James III, wandered through the courts of Europe. As I mentioned, according to his father’s plans, Charles was to marry the Infanta of Spain. Instead, he married the Catholic Henrietta Maria, daughter of the King of France, Louis XIII, with the understanding of a solemn promise that Charles would grant English Catholics freedom of worship. Friendly relations between France and England soon faltered because Charles refused to help the French subdue the Huguenot uprisings. As if this were not enough, England suffered a setback in the Thirty Years War because the Elector Frederick (who had married the king’s sister, Elizabeth) was unable to retake the Palatinate. The Cadiz expedition against Spain in 1625 also met with failure, making the final result three defeats out of three endeavours. After the murder of the King’s favourite, Buckingham, in 1628, Parliament was not recalled for another eleven years, during which the king ruled as an absolute monarch, levying ever increasing taxes on the wealthier of his subjects in order to maintain his fleet. This period is in fact referred to as ‘the eleven years of tyranny’. However, it is also true that 1628 saw the approval of a Petition of Rights which provided guarantees

7

§ 34.2.

§ 1. The Stuart century

7/I

against arbitrary imprisonment and the raising of taxes without the consent of Parliament. 5. ‘The causes of the Civil War’ is the title and the subject of a book by Lawrence Stone,8 who challenges the theory that the spark that lit the fire was the economic rise of the gentry throughout the century. He sees the root cause, instead, in the appearance of a political subject – Puritanism – which sought and found representation in the House of Commons, and the tangible and irreversible result of which was religious tolerance. By the end of this process, Puritanism had been assimilated and metabolized, and could no longer be expunged. According to Stone, there are six historical models of revolution, empirically reconstructed, from which to choose in order to identify and classify the English Civil War: of these, the ‘conspiratorial coup d’état’ seems the closest match. In reality, all six types are included by the Solomonic scholar in what is a kind of mixed regime model. Stone adds that the Civil War was a revolution that looked back to golden ages or similar, as well as forward, to the future. For him, everything comes together, because there are, as in every revolution, ‘pre-conditions’ and ‘detonators’. The causes are to be sought in the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth: absolutism and the draining of the Exchequer to finance the war against France – so that the reign of James may be seen as chaos skilfully kept under control (the distant pre-condition) –; the nearer prerequisite was Elizabeth’s wait and see policy, made worse by her successors on the throne. Concrete steps leading to the Civil War, the detonators, can be identified in the series of repressive measures taken by Charles against both Puritans and Presbyterians. In 1639 Scotland reacted against blatant attempts to depuritanize her and to impose the Laudian Prayer Book (Archbishop Laud’s intent was to ‘re-Catholicize’ the Anglican Church on a model preceding the errors of Rome) by issuing the Covenant, a national pact against the English king and in favour of religious freedom and the laws of Scotland. In the same year, the English border garrison had been harried. The king summoned the governor of Ireland, Wentworth – celebrated 200 years later in a play by Browning – to lead a punitive expedition against the

8

L. Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution 1529–1642, London 1972.

8/I Part I  Jacobean, Caroline and Republican Poetry and Prose

Scots.9 But the financial requests made to the reconvened Parliament could not be met and the house was dissolved, becoming known as the ‘Short Parliament’. A second war against the Scots was inevitable and, owing to inadequate funding, was lost. The reconvened Parliament, traditionally known as the ‘Long Parliament’, had the upper hand, thanks to the guidance of the Puritan veteran, John Pym. By the summer of 1640 a silent revolution was under way and Parliament was largely victorious in bills discussed and approved, amongst which were: the obligation to summon Parliament every three years; the abolition of the Prerogative Courts; taxes to be levied only with the consent of Parliament. The Great Remonstrance of 1641, which formalized these successes, was passed in the House with a majority of only nine votes (among the nays was the poet, Waller, convinced that the reform was a step towards revolution, though Parliament included a number of moderate Episcopalians). The reaction of the king was a botched attempt to arrest five members of the house. The Queen saw the direction events were taking and left for Paris, where she subsequently was to take under her protective wing a number of Catholic or moderately Protestant poets. Furthermore, the Court was transferred to York (summer of 1642). The two parties which were to join combat in the war that was about to break out were called, from then on, ‘Cavaliers’ (royalists) and ‘Roundheads’ (Puritan parliamentarians); in other words, the nobility who were loyal to the king against the wealthy merchant class. This clear-cut opposition soon crumbled: sects appeared which were even more radical than the Puritans,10 overtaken in reforming zeal by Congregationalists and Independents, who demanded complete freedom from the Church of England and autonomy for local religious communities. On a national scale, an area comprising the North, West and Midlands, home of the landed gentry, was a royalist stronghold; the South, East and London were mercantile and parliamentarian. Generally speaking, the Puritan side had the support of those involved in trade and living in economically dynamic 9 10

Papers taken from Wentworth revealed plans and manoeuvres to land an Irish army to crush the Scottish rebels; with Laud, the Irish governor was imprisoned in the Tower, where both were executed in 1641 and 1645. For a complete list see ASH, 28ff.

§ 1. The Stuart century

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areas, as well as sea ports and manufacturing districts with a burgeoning network of connections between the smallholder and the merchant class. The countryside was largely royalist, as were market towns with no overseas connections. 6. Oliver Cromwell, a descendant of Henry VIII’s chief minister, was born in Huntington near Cambridge, into a family of the well-to-do gentry. He was a mediocre student of Latin, but excelled at sports from an early age. He inherited property and entered Parliament. Fiercely anti-Papist already in 1628, he stood up for his fellow citizens against abuses of power and petitioned in favour of the inhabitants of his native Fenlands. Around 1636, he went through a religious crisis and believed himself to be singled out as the secular arm of God’s design for England, which consisted principally in the ‘root and branch’ abolition of episcopacy. In January 1642 he organized a coup aimed at taking control of the army and key military infrastructures. Immediately afterwards, he formed a parliamentary army, choosing its commanders with great care and imposing iron discipline on the cadres. This was Cromwell’s reaction to the creation of an army by Charles, who in the meantime had repaired to Oxford. The name of ‘Ironsides’ was given to Cromwell’s soldiers by Prince Rupert, the royalist general whose troops were repeatedly routed in the field. At this point, enter at Cromwell’s side the famous General (or Lieutenant) Fairfax of Hull, or, more precisely, of Appleton House, the subject of several poems by Marvell.11 After the victorious battle of Marston Moor in 1644, during which Cromwell was wounded, the final blow to the king was delayed owing to the indecision of the Earl of Manchester, who in a famous speech pronounced that ‘the king was the king’. This defeatism was rejected by Cromwell, a maximalist and enemy to compromise, ready to criticize Parliament for withholding funds for the army, whose troops were underpaid (indeed, Parliament ordered the dissolution of the Army). With an act of insubordination, Cromwell proceeded to bring the Civil War to an end, defeating the royalist Scots and seizing the king, who was executed on 30 January 1649. By this time, however, Cromwell’s army had given birth to a number of fringe

11

§ 25.3.

10/I Part I  Jacobean, Caroline and Republican Poetry and Prose

groups – such as the Levellers and the Independents – who were to have brief significant repercussions on the political scenario. In 1647 a People’s Agreement was put forward on the initiative of agitators inside the army demanding payment of back pay, indemnities and sundry guarantees, and above all, a republican constitution, universal suffrage, freedom of worship, equality before the law and abolition of monopolies. Faced by the refusal of Parliament, the army at first mutinied, then increased the stakes, making demands that fell just short of blackmail. In play was the redistribution of seats on the basis of the counties’ taxable income, and increased levels of taxation for those counties with the greatest number of parliamentary seats. So there threatened to be an alliance between the agitators of the army and the radical elements of London. Fairfax restored order and calmed the agitators with promises. On this occasion the moderate gentry was already moving towards the king, fearing a widespread uprising if the radicals and agitators were to prevail. Ordinary people, on their side, protested against the current crisis and invoked honest government. In fact, they and the gentry formed a common front in calling for a return to law and order and the status quo, whilst at the same time denouncing the repressiveness of the Puritan regime. Alongside the Puritans, Independents and Baptists could be heard the clamour of the Fifth Monarchists who believed human history had reached the fourth of the five ages predicted in the Book of Daniel, the age of the Antichrist of Roman Catholicism. In their different ways all these separatist and radical groups were advocates of a ‘government of saints and the righteous’. But the coalition between ordinary soldiers and the Levellers aimed at radicalizing the People’s Agreement into a democratic constitution could not last, in part because some groups were willing to make do with the partial victories they had achieved, unlike other more extreme movements.12 7. In 1647 Cromwell found himself confronted by two enemies: the king, who had escaped and taken refuge on the Isle of Wight, promised 12

Some writers (Lilburne, Walwyn, Overton, Winstanley) did in fact put forward ideas not far from communism (cf. ASH, 110–12), or, rather, ‘Christian socialism’, which was to come back into fashion among the Victorians. Many of the above became Quakers.

§ 1. The Stuart century

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the Scots Presbyterianism for three years in exchange for their support. When the war resumed in 1648, the Scots were blocked on their way to London. A ‘purge’, which led to the expulsion from Parliament of those members who intended to come to terms with the king, was decided upon by the cadres of the army; the officer who proposed the purge happened to be called Pride. The king’s execution, while not decided by Cromwell, was approved in writing by him. Stories abounded of him wandering about in disguise at night, muttering, like some character out of Shakespeare, that ‘cursed necessity was the cause’. In reality, Cromwell, though at first intending to save the monarchy, soon became convinced that the king had to die. The birth of the Commonwealth entailed ipso facto the abolition of the House of Lords besides the monarchy itself, leaving a Parliament reduced to 90 members (irreverently referred to as the ‘Rump’), practically an oligarchy. With the end of the civil wars in 1652 came the need to restore the legal and ecclesiastical spheres. A Parliament subsequently named ‘Barebones’, instated in July 1653, lasted barely long enough to approve Cromwell’s election as Protector, an appointment welcomed by Milton but deplored by the Fifth Monarchists. Levellers and New Levellers, who set up forms of kolkhoz in Surrey, were wiped out; foreign courts sniffed suspiciously; Charles II was biding his time; royalist Ireland was rebelling, and Scotland was horrified by the treatment meted out to Presbyterians in an army dominated by Independents, and secretly considered the possibility of reaching an advantageous agreement with the king. After defeating the Irish in August 1649 (the massacre of Drogheda), Cromwell returned home to the praise of Marvell, whose protector, Fairfax, however, gave up his command of the troops when Cromwell marched against the Scots, who had indeed made a pact with the king to the effect that, if reinstated, he would allow the clauses of the Covenant. The Scots were defeated, and Charles forced to flee in September 1651. In the summer of the following year Cromwell declared war on the Dutch with a Navigation Act which imposed restrictions on the entry of Dutch goods into England. On the home front the army in disarray invoked either an oligarchic government of  ‘saints’ or a reformed Parliament. In April 1653 an exasperated Cromwell dissolved the ‘Rump’ and became from then on sole dictator of republican England. Yet he was a dictator who regulated ecclesiastical appointments,

12/I Part I  Jacobean, Caroline and Republican Poetry and Prose

levied taxes, formally kept Catholics under close scrutiny without persecuting them, and summoned and dissolved other parliaments. He also selected as regional commanders men of proven and boundless loyalty. Death took him (1658) when his star was beginning to fade. In 1654 he had survived an attack on his life, and refused the new Parliament’s offer of the royal crown; an expedition against the Spaniards in the Caribbean was largely unsuccessful. In a matter of a few years he had become a cynical and Machiavellian dictator; of the cheering crowd he would say, echoing Shakespeare, ‘these very persons would shout as much if you (General Lambert) and I were going to be hanged’.13 Overall, Cromwell was above all one of the greatest military leaders of all time, and, according to the English, second only to Marlborough or Wellington. His overriding aim was to promote the Protestant cause in Europe and to favour English colonists wherever they went. He may therefore be seen as the first conscious imperialist, and responsible for restoring England’s prestige among the European powers. His tolerant version of Puritanism, too, should be seen in a new light, though the English tend to overstate his much trumpeted freedom of conscience, from which only Catholics were excluded! He was a lodestar for Marvell and Milton and became an inspiration for future writers, not only English, in poetry, the novel and the theatre. Contemporary historians and those immediately following were divided in their judgement according to their religious and political beliefs. In the eighteenth century he was execrated by Whigs and Tories alike. Carlyle made him the model of his heroic, Romantic conception of history, which justified even massacre in the name of palingenetic ideals and aims. The repercussions of Cromwell’s rule on the cultural life of the nation are inescapable: not only did the Puritans call a complete halt to all theatrical performances, deemed ‘frivolous’, but at Oxford and Cambridge they presented the dons with an ultimatum: either they signed the Covenant which asserted the supreme authority of Parliament and limited the rights of the king, or they would be expelled. The objective was the puritanization of the nation’s culture (compare the ‘fascistizzazione’ of the state in Italy in 1925). Many teachers

13

ASH, 93.

§ 1. The Stuart century

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pre-empted the expected blow and escaped, first to royalist Oxford, then to France in the wake of the Queen, Henrietta Maria, who was already safely installed in Paris, where she extended her protection to those caught up in this temporary diaspora. From 1640 to 1660 literature became particularly militant, with writers becoming secretaries or government officials, either collaborating with the new regime, like Marvell and Milton, or choosing exile with the royalists. Cowley was the first to write a contemporary poem on the Civil War, and then to plan, begin but then abandon his Davideis, after taking from the Bible a ‘type’ of history then unfolding, the deadly quarrel between David and Saul, the latter representing Cromwell and inspired by the figure of Satan in the first diabolic council. 8. At the death of Cromwell, his son Richard proved to be incapable of taking on the role of Protector; the army was against him, and put forward their own candidate, an insignificant figure. Richard ended up by fleeing to France, where he lived under an alias (though he died in England in 1712). But why did Parliament, inexplicably, invite Charles II to return? Because it was feared that radicalism would rear its head again and haunt the country; because discord broke out between the two generals of the army, resulting in the victory of the one representing the moderate Presbyterian faction which favoured a monarchy that was willing to come to terms; and because the army’s political role was no longer predominant. In 1661, on the anniversary of the beheading of Charles I, the bodies of Cromwell, Ireton and Bradshaw (his right hand men) were disinterred; their severed heads were displayed in front of Westminster Hall. Charles II was recalled, on the assurance (the Declaration of Breda) that he would pay salaries and arrears to the army, allow freedom of conscience, and regulate the selling and purchase of land14 – in order to restore not a personal monarchy but a parliamentary one. The King’s Council was made up of officials of the former Protectorate. The Scottish and Irish Parliaments were restored, many post-1642 laws were repealed, the bishops returned to their sees from abroad with greater powers than before, and the Laudian Book of 14 Not all royalist landowners were compensated for land bought by the Puritans at ridiculously low prices; these measures created new Whig landowners but made a lot of Tories unhappy.

14/I Part I  Jacobean, Caroline and Republican Poetry and Prose

Prayer was enforced, albeit with slight regional modifications. With a certain amount of discretion Charles chivvied local authorities to ensure their support for him, to control the farther-flung parts of the country and to influence the choice of members of Parliament. In other words, he broke the chain that Elizabeth had forged to link the Privy Council with local councils and justices of the peace. Persecuted Dissenters found a new institutional identity in the Whigs, while the Tories stood for the national status of the Anglican Church.15 The Whig party arose from a strange mixture of Puritanism and neo-rationalism. We shall see more clearly in the following section how the Royal Society gave rise to a huge amount of scientific research, and contributed to the separation of science from religion. On the cultural plane, for the first time in twenty years the theatres re-opened, but with significant functional changes.16 On a sociological level, consumers welcomed new goods on the English market, the production in series began of clothes and objects, local arts and crafts grew apace, the first regular coach service revolutionized travel within the kingdom. A townbased bourgeoisie, often called a ‘pseudo-nobility’, gained strength, creating relationships with the landed aristocracy, often becoming its partner: vicars, doctors, lawyers, administrators, as well as army and naval officers. The first weekly newspaper was published, the work of John Houghton and Roger L’Estrange, which advertised books, auctions, inventions and miscellaneous news. 9. Charles II, tall and dark-skinned, was an athlete, horseman, hunter, as well as an affable and incorrigible libertine, who appropriately fathered

15

16

The use of these ideological and political labels became stabilized when the Parliament of James II split in two, the ‘Abhorrers’ siding with James and the ‘Petitioners’ against him. Etymologically the name ‘tories’ may be traced back to ‘Irish bandits’ who supported the landed aristocracy and the royal prerogative and who were distinguished by non-resistance to the Crown. The term ‘whigs’, instead, goes back to ‘Scottish peasants’, who supported the progressive mercantile class, were against royal absolutism and favourable to religious tolerance. More precisely, ‘whig’ is a shortened form of  ‘whiggamore’, supporters of the Presbyterian cause in Scotland, and averse to the handing over of the crown to James II. § 46.1.

§ 1. The Stuart century

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a number of illegitimate children but none within wedlock. Known as the ‘merry monarch’, he was indeed popular and well-loved by his subjects; the care-free pleasure-seeking atmosphere of his reign, which owed much to the court of Louis XIV, was only temporarily disturbed by two national disasters: the plague of 1665 (68,000 dead in London in one year) and the Great Fire of London a year later (eighty-four churches destroyed, amongst which St Paul’s, subsequently rebuilt by Wren). Religious controversy was far from dead, although Charles did his best to maintain the balance between opposing forces. He promised to pardon the Puritans as soon as he came to power in 1660, but in fact resumed the persecution of Dissenters; this was entirely logical, since the Parliament was royalist. In spite of his Catholic leanings, Charles ratified laws against religious freedom, and made it necessary to belong to the Anglican Church in order to obtain public office. The opportunity was missed to turn England into a religiously tolerant nation, which would have made her stronger, not weaker. The fault lay both with the Anglicans and the intransigent Puritans. His foreign policy, too, was confused and contradictory. His need of money led him to take sides with France; he declared war on the Low Countries in 1665–1667 and 1672–1674, the motivation being the usual trade disputes and the American colonies, without winning either time (also because, as Dryden remarked, the outcomes of war were dependent on the two national disasters already mentioned). In 1667 Dutch vessels had sailed up the Thames creating panic until peace was declared. After the fall of Clarendon, the despicable social-climber Buckingham formed a ministry together with four other noblemen, whose initials, together with his, spelled the word ‘Cabal’. The Cabal ministry was forced to resign in 1674 after the third Anglo-Dutch war. Charles then formed an alliance with Sweden and the Low Countries in order to hinder French activity in Holland, while, shortly after, signing an agreement with Louis XIV to reinstate Catholicism in England as state religion. By 1674 Charles’s Parliament flaunted pugnaciously republican tendencies while his court oozed Catholicism from every pore. Some small colonial gain had been made at the expense of the Low Countries, but this, together with the fruits of the alliance with France in terms of subsidies, was insufficient payback for the king’s adventurous policies. Further obstacles were raised by the new minister, Danby, and Parliament. A hugely important

16/I Part I  Jacobean, Caroline and Republican Poetry and Prose

event was the marriage of Mary, daughter of the king’s brother, James, to William of Orange.17 Charles died a Catholic in 1680, proof of the victory of France, just after the discovery of yet another alleged Papist plot (Titus Oates), which sent a shiver through the nation, and led to purges and executions of Catholics, as well as to the rise of Shaftesbury and Buckingham, who presented to Parliament the Exclusion Bill (with special reference to the future James II), which is the central theme of Dryden’s famous satire.18 The last years of his reign were marked by bitter disputes between the two parties, for and against the king, by another far-fetched plot to assassinate him, and by new revolutionary, Cromwellian conspiracies. 10. James II, unlike his brother, was haughty, pedantic, attached to etiquette, and just as libertine though less discerning. Before his accession he had married the daughter of Clarendon. The second openly Catholic monarch of  England (the first being ‘Bloody Mary’), he had a distinguished career as an officer in both the French and Spanish armies, and, after the Restoration, reformed and governed the navy in attacks against the Low Countries. He converted secretly to Catholicism in 1671, and persuaded his wife to do the same, but his two daughters, Mary and Anne, were raised as Protestants. On the death of his first wife, he married the Catholic Princess Maria of Modena. He personally summoned the priest who administered extreme unction to his dying brother. All this induced the Protestants to demand his exclusion from the throne. Once king, he bullied a weak Parliament into handing over the money they had denied his brother. He punished severely those who took part in two failed rebellions (one led by the illegitimate son of Charles II, Monmouth, who was executed). But he lost the favour of his people by showing quite clearly his intention to bring back Catholicism as the state religion: key roles in the army, navy

17

18

ASH, 138–9, opines that this was a slap in the face of France, as Charles II, after all, had gained a very small subsidy from Louis XIV compared to his considerable needs, and that he aspired to become Europe’s arbiter. On the contrary, European diplomatic transactions in 1677 caused a reduction of British prestige and spread in the nation, once again, the fear that a form of Catholic despotism might be introduced. § 51.2. One of the better laws passed concerned legal guarantees, usually known as Habeas Corpus.

§ 1. The Stuart century

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and judiciary were already occupied by Catholics. Parliamentary activity, now reduced to a relationship between the king’s plenipotentiary and Parliament, gradually ground to a halt. Parliament’s deficiencies were made up for by the scrupulous work of local authorities. The point of no return was reached when James’s pro-Catholic policies were no longer tolerable, and it was clear that the king had lost the support of the country. The Anglicans reached out to William of Orange.19 In February 1689, the Whigs scored an important point: the office of the king was to be elective, not by divine right, which meant that the king could be deposed if he ruled badly. The Clarendon Code was abrogated, and measures were approved with guaranteed greater, if not yet total, religious freedom. This led to discontent in some quarters (seven bishops refused to swear allegiance to James).20 It is only slightly paradoxical that the Parliament’s decision to depose James and crown William was approved by the Pope, Innocent XI, since the choice of William meant that England would be removed from the French sphere of influence. 11. Considered objectively, the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689 is a bundle of inexplicable contradictions: the English people had accepted an openly Catholic king a few years after the end of a civil war against what might be called ‘creeping Catholicism’; a Catholic king married his Protestant daughter to a Protestant, and the daughter of this same king took up arms against her father and dethroned him. Yet no major playwright took

19

France was spoiling for war and threatened the Low Countries, which obviously feared the intervention of England. In January 1688, six English regiments were withdrawn from Holland, leaving her much weaker. The final straw was the unexpected birth of an heir to the throne. A letter urging the invasion of England was delivered to William by an admiral disguised as a deckhand. Hasty concessions made by the English king served no purpose, and on 5 November 1688, the Dutch fleet, joined by English and Scottish exiles, landed in Torbay, meeting no resistance. William was determined to return England to the Protestant fold and ensure the right of succession of his wife, Mary. 20 Non-jurors: bishops led by Sancroft, who refused to violate the oath of allegiance made to James II.

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up this eminently theatrical plot.21 James II aged rapidly, became overtly pious, and set up his court in exile. Any hopes he may have had of a return to power were shattered by the peace of Ryswick (1697), with which Louis XIV recognized the legitimacy of William as king of England. The Old Pretender, James III, survived many years, causing ever-decreasing ripples in the pool of early eighteenth-century English politics. Interest in the ‘romantic’ aspects of this figure was revived by writers such as Thackeray. The Old Pretender, and his son, ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’, stirred nostalgia among the Scots (and particularly in Scott) until the middle of the century (see the Jacobite toast to the ‘king across the water’). With a number of laws, among which the Bill of Rights of 1689, William and Mary placed constraints on the powers of the Crown and sanctioned freedom of religion for all – except Catholics. Never a popular king, William suffered from asthma, tuberculosis, and limped to boot. He stipulated the Great Alliance against France. The course of history might have been changed had William been unsuccessful in his Irish campaign, but it was thanks to help from Louis XIV that James’s attempt to regain power was crushed in the great battle of the Boyne in 1690. After the defeat of the French, the Channel became English again after centuries of French control. In truth, William’s position was always somewhat precarious, and, almost inevitably, the country began to wish for the return of the deposed king, James II, if only he were not a Catholic! Plots, real or imaginary, abounded to get rid of William, who had lost his wife Mary in 1694. Jacobitism was on the rise, and even if James himself died in Calais, the Old Pretender was acknowledged as legitimate king by Louis XIV. The death of the son of the future queen, Anne, raised the prickly question of succession, while, at the death of William in March 1702, on the horizon appeared John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, head of the army in the war against France.

21

Possibly only the poet, Anne Finch, Lady Winchilsea (§ 105), made any reference to the ‘theft’ of the throne by his daughter and her foreign husband, appealing to all those who loved their country (cf. her elegy on the death of James II).

§ 2. Literary genres up to the Restoration

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§ 2. Literary genres up to the Restoration It goes without saying that English literature from 1601 to 1660 – excluding the theatre up to 1642, which is dealt with in Volume 1 of this History – does not include the novel, and that the principal genres are, in order of importance, poetry, religious and political tracts, polemical pamphlets, sermons and philosophical essays. In a very real sense, the most important literary work of the period is anonymous or collective, and a translation – that of the Bible, published in 1611, fruit of the labours of a team of scholars appointed by James I. All together, these genres present numerous epistemic and ideological motifs, ipso facto giving rise to a literary landscape enriched by the products of the conflicts underlying it. Broadly speaking, two schools of thought predominate in the seventeenth century and form the background to its literature: atheism (with its offshoots of materialistic hedonism and rationalism) and fideism. Materialism branches into science, experimentalism, naturalism and Ramism, the sworn enemy of Aristotelian philosophy. Fideism is Neo-Platonic, Anglican, Puritan, Catholic, not to mention numerous other denominations and sects. None of the above-mentioned can be fitted neatly into a particular poetic or prose genre. In general, scientific materialism lies in the province of the philosophical essay, where at times it is even reconciled with fideism; it may, however, appear in a purely poetic context. Hedonism ties up with erotic, or Cavalier, poetry. On the other hand, the presence of fideism can be found in various genres, mainly poetic, and Neo-Platonism is a pervasive element in every kind of seventeenth-century religious poetry. On a European level, the terms of reference are concettismo, Baroque and Mannerism. The gradual transition to the Augustan age is foreshadowed in Cowley, Denham and Waller. Poetic imagination measures up against science, and, weakened almost to extinction, will only be fully restored in the Romantic Age. Until Milton, short poetic compositions abound, but the ‘large, grand poem’ is absent, though there are plenty of long ones, mostly the work of the followers of Spenser. 2. It might be argued that poetry dominates the seventeenth-century literary scene mainly because of a lack of rival genres (leaving out Herbert, Marvell and Milton). There is a gap of nearly fifty years between, on the one hand, Spenser and Sidney, and the first significant Caroline poets on

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the other. Donne lived on until 1631, but only as a preacher. In political terms, ‘Cavalier’ refers to the supporters of Charles I and the monarchy in general; in literary terms it indicates the court poets, usually of noble family, whose verses are characterized by neoclassical clarity and elegance of style, and by moral laxity and, often, profanity, in the content. Behind the four main exponents – Carew, Suckling, Lovelace, plus Herrick with reservations – lies the refinement, concision and balance of Jonson’s poetry. Cavalier verse finds its opposite in Metaphysical poetry, which is, however, not content (or not only content) but a poetic style, so that it is possible to find, for example in Donne, erotic content couched in a Metaphysical style. Metaphysical poetry is usually said to begin with Donne, though elements of the style can be seen in Elizabethan poets. Initially the word ‘metaphysical’ was used in a derogatory sense – as a kind of nickname. A much-used synonym was the expression ‘strong lines’, indicating brevity, concentration, the use of ingenious but appropriate conceits. Both terms implied a vivid, real life experience behind the poetic composition. Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery by Rosemond Tuve,1 still today the most detailed study of imagery in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry, suggests that Renaissance writers already had an organic concept of poetic composition, according to which the meaning was not a nucleus in prose embellished by decorative elements, as stated in many contemporary aesthetic theories. Metaphysical poetry is grounded in logic, and indeed is often a ‘poetry of definition’. Ramist logic is the basis of Metaphysical poetry when the direction of the argument is ‘from the particular to the universal’, or when the poem hinges on a disjunctive syllogism. One chapter of Tuve’s book is dedicated to Henry King and his poetry based on definition, differentiation and discrimination, and corroboration or proof through similitude. Her last chapter deals with the didactic element in seventeenth-century poetry, where ‘didactic’ is not to be understood in a merely literal sense. As T. S. Eliot observed, everything in this poetry is theoretically fused together, so that it is impossible to separate ‘poetry’ from ‘reasoning’. The Metaphysical becomes

1

Chicago 1947.

§ 2. Literary genres up to the Restoration

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Baroque in the mingling of sacred and profane love, in the fantasizing on death and in its eschatological fixation.2 Furthermore, Metaphysical poetry is conceptual while Baroque verse clearly shows strong affinities with the figurative arts. 3. The religious poetry of seventeenth-century England is tri-polar: Anglican, Puritan and Catholic; and in form and style, as well as perception, it may be Metaphysical, Baroque or indeed Cavalier, with reference to Jonsonian concision. The main stimulus for the seventeenth century’s collective imagination was the King  James Bible, with the result that a good half of the books published between 1600 and 1640 were of a religious nature (rather like the situation in the Victorian age). Literacy levels had risen, and if there were as yet no newspapers in the modern sense of the word, there were plenty of preachers, some extemporary, in the streets and market squares, not just in the churches and chapels. The Quakers later maintained that one did not need to be ordained to preach according to one’s belief. Puritanism became synonymous both with holy living in the fear of the Lord and with rabid anti-Catholicism. The typical Puritan read the Bible every day, prayed, kept a spiritual diary, catechized. More and more merchants and shopkeepers tended to become Puritans for economic, rather than purely spiritual, reasons; that is, to compromise Spanish supremacy on the high seas, which was in fact tolerated, not to say encouraged by monopolies that the king had awarded to his favourites. Though politically speaking it lasted only twenty years, Puritanism left indelible marks on the country; ‘Puritan Sunday’ cast its gloomy shadow right up to the time of Dickens and Ruskin; deeper and more lasting was the effect on the American mentality. But only the most unsophisticated and extreme

2

In her fine essay, ‘The European Background to Baroque Sensibility’ (PGU, vol. 3, 89–97), the author, Odette De Mourgues, creates the identikit of a certain kind of English Baroque poet who wrote, she says, as if suffering from mental contortions and from paroxysms of sensuality, subject to Montaignesque mood swings, and pervaded by symptoms of crisis in contrast with Renaissance harmony. The author admits that England did have some well-balanced minds, but deems that these were outnumbered by this species of mad poet, delirious, visionary and with no sense of proportion.

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Puritans were hostile to the arts and to entertainment, and the Great Tew circle is witness to tolerance and mutual respect across ideological divisions.3 The flourishing of English poetry in the seventeenth century has no precedents and may be compared only with that of the thirteenth century; but explicitly Puritan verse is less frequent than Anglican or Catholic poetry; Marvell’s work is not only Puritan, Milton transcends all limitation, and Bunyan has become a household name as a preacher and story-teller. 4. L. L. Martz and Barbara Kiefer Lewalski are the authors of two well-known, conflicting interpretations of seventeenth-century religious poetry tout court. In The Poetry of Meditation4 Martz argues that there is a great deal of the Catholic and crypto-Catholic in the Anglicanism of the first third of the century, and that the meditative spirituality of the principal Anglican poets was influenced by Italian, French and Spanish spiritual treatises translated and published secretly in England. The Ignatian model of meditation not only does not exclude, but belongs together with the treatises on rhetoric and logic studied by Tuve, as the author himself admits. Before Donne, one writer who certainly was familiar with these texts was the now neglected poet William Alabaster (1567–1640), suspected of Catholicism and author of sonnets in manuscript which bring to mind the Donne of the Holy Sonnets. Indeed, Alabaster anticipates various aspects of Jesuit meditation, so that the expression ‘the school of Donne’ appears to be something of a misnomer, since the founder of the school is Alabaster. Thus Martz discovers a seventeenth-century Catholic England which is larger than was thought, and from which it is not at all true that the Counter-Reformation was absent. The first consequence of the use in poetry of the Catholic meditative technique is the visual method, in, for example, the ‘graphic’ opening lines of the poems by Donne or Herbert. So Martz defines Donne’s Holy Sonnets as ‘parts of an exercise […] transposed into an explicitly poetic form’. The structure of the Petrarchan sonnet, 4–4–6, may be taken as a model also for the analogy with Ignatian 3 4

In this Oxfordshire mansion, owned by Lord Falkland, churchmen and writers of various confessions retreated in the 1630s to meditate and debate in a spirit of harmony. New Haven, CT 1954.

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meditation. Loyola’s meditation was complex and demanding, and so a simplified contemplative technique, elaborated by St Francis of Sales and by his disciple Camus, gained popularity in England. Another text that had a great influence on poetry was St Bonaventure’s Meditations on the Life of Christ, which entailed the imaginary dramatization of every single detail of the life of Christ. The meditations focus on both the divine and the human in the nature of Jesus. The cult of the Virgin, too, was practised clandestinely and openly by Herbert and Vaughan. The practice of the Dominican rosary and the ‘little crown of the Virgin Mary’, launched by Southwell, was taken up by Donne. Martz sees all this as a split between Scholasticism and meditative, mystical trends; an amalgam, in short, of the emotional and the rational. But the essential point is that for Martz ‘self-examination’ is a Catholic rather than Puritan trait; indeed a Jesuit one, and included in the Spiritual Exercises. In the context of tract literature, Lorenzo Scupoli’s Combattimento spirituale is relevant on this score, establishing as it does ‘a kind of Catholic Puritanism’. Herbert is ‘Salesian’ in feeling no repugnance for death. The few Puritan spiritual tracts that Martz examines would have been quite extraneous to the Catholic genre, and this because of the Calvinist doctrine of grace. Particularly alien to the Puritans was the Ignatian technique of compositio loci. The Puritans revered Christ the Redeemer, the Catholics the infant Jesus and the Nativity (like Crashaw, and like Milton too). Martz points out that the Puritan Richard Baxter (The Saints Everlasting Rest, 1650) cautiously indicates and recommends meditative methods similar to those of the Counter-Reformation, above all the need for sensory assistance. Objections to Martz were raised particularly in Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric by Kiefer Lewalski.5 Everything is turned upside down: those elements that Martz associated with Catholicism (the paradigm of ‘sin and salvation’, the fluctuations in mood, the Deus absconditus) are re-interpreted in a Protestant light, and traced in Protestant tracts and Biblical compendiums that underlined the centrality of the Psalms as poetry. The Bible itself was a source of tropes that would be used in contemporary poetry: sin as sickness,

5

Princeton, NJ 1979.

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darkness or slavery; the Christian life as a pilgrimage, or as a garden, with God as the gardener; the building of the Temple. But compared to the Catholics, the Protestants limit the proliferation of the ‘senses’ and condemn the abundance of allegories, favouring the bare, literal text. Concluding her counter-arguments, Lewalski goes so far as to find in Herbert ironic barbs against Ignatian meditation. On the other hand, ornament and wit were held to be an integral part of the Bible, the style of which was to be imitated as an insuperable model of eloquence and rhetoric. As a synthesis of these two antithetical books, let me repeat what I said at the beginning: different factors from different sources mingle and mix so completely that it becomes almost impossible to distinguish which is which. Emblems and emblem poetry served Catholics and Anglicans alike, and Puritans too, and its extraordinary, superior, primeval power of persuasion,6 based on the symbiosis of text and image, kept everyone happy. In the end the relationship between image and text was inverted, with the words becoming the fundamentals and the image an added extra. 5. It is equally indispensable to define English seventeenth-century poetry in its relation to the three or four aesthetic and epistemic sensibilities that permeate and mould the development of the arts on the Continent: the Renaissance, the late Renaissance, Mannerism, and the Baroque. These labels are notoriously difficult to pin down, and allude to some dominant components which are clear and others which are variable and less distinct, difficult to place chronologically (and, in the case of Mannerism and the Baroque, often allotted inverted time slots depending on points of view and the culture of individual countries). In A Social History of Art,7 Arnold Hauser proposed the most obvious genetic transition by observing that Renaissance classicism was brief and fragile, and Mannerism picked up the signs of crisis and disintegration, reacted to its formalism and for this reason remained anchored to the preceding style, instead of developing new ideas of reality. The manneristic ‘open’ text is revealed in clearer signs of 6 7

Studied, for example, in its expressive and semiotic mechanisms, in L. Innocenti, Vis Eloquentiae, Palermo 1983. Vol. 2, Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque, New York 1987 (1st edn 1951). The page numbers in brackets refer to the 1987 edition.

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conflict in its rhetoric, in the prevalence of antitheses and oxymora, in an unsettling sense of the infinite (Pascal’s frisson), and in the tension present in even calm and peaceful scenes. In a topological context, too, spatial unity is shattered, and centre and periphery are inverted. The identification of Mannerism with several anti-classical anomalies of form – such as the mixing of plot-lines, irrationality, eccentricity, digressiveness, lack of structural unity, discarded material – swells the bounds of the category and turns even Sterne into a mannerist ante litteram (147ff.). For Hauser, Shakespeare is a mannerist, perhaps even the main English representative of the category; and since Mannerism and the Baroque are like father and son, or brother and sister, he is also a baroque mannerist or vice versa, without there being any contradiction in terms. Page 178 of Hauser gives a list of contrasts – formal, structural, linguistic and stylistic – to support his diagnosis. As for chronology, Mannerism may be seen as preceding, contemporary with, or even later than the Baroque (103). In terms of the social history of art, Mannerism was a court phenomenon which spread throughout Europe, achieving an international status second only to the earlier Gothic fashion; the Baroque is rooted in the people and is largely an emotional and theatrical phenomenon. Baroque brought painters into the ecclesiastical fold and made religion more attractive and persuasive. Court Mannerism undoubtedly is an expression of the Counter-Reformation, but this is even more true of Baroque that aimed to revive the faith of the ordinary people. As an example of the chronological precedence of Italian Mannerism – which is complex, intellectual and cold, and is followed by a sensual Baroque, hot and passionate, addressed to the masses rather than to the intellectual elite – Hauser cites the Carraccis, great simplifiers, and the whole Roman Baroque culture with its reference points of Pietro da Cortona, Rubens and Bernini. Mannerism is, in any case, homogeneous, while the Baroque takes on various forms according to where it is practised. 6. In the wider but more disorderly panorama presented by G. R. Hocke8 we find a repetition of the general thesis that Mannerism is tension and torsion, above all ideological, psychic and stylistic. Hocke too

8

G. R. Hocke, Manierismus in der Literatur, Hamburg 1959.

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tends to see Baroque as proceeding from and developing into Mannerism rather than the other way round. Baroque was attenuated Mannerism, but a Mannerism which in turn was destined to decline and become a patchedup version of itself. Compared with other studies of mannerist culture, that of Hocke must be credited with linking artistic phenomena with the manuals by Tesauro or Gracián, which theorized and recommended composition in code, verbal labyrinths, cryptography, and, above all, any creative method in which the acoustic, verbal or puzzle effects overshadow the content. Another merit of this book is to include Greek and Asian culture – seen as opposite poles – as possible distant cradles of Mannerism.9 A third merit is to have identified connections with Hermetism, absent in Baroque. The principal exponent of Mannerism is Giambattista Marino, who owes much to the Florentine Neo-Platonists, who in turn are versed in cabalistic alchemy and the arcana of the Hebrew alphabet (it may be remembered that the Runic alphabet was endowed with similar metaphysical, occult value). From the time of the ancient Egyptians and the Old Testament Hebrews, the letters of the alphabet were considered to be of divine origin. mannerist semantics, esoteric and secret, expresses itself in the permutation and reassembling of letters; Hocke cites the famous Shakespearean tongue-twister from Love’s Labour’s Lost, ‘honorificabilitudinitatibus’, as containing a mysterious coded message. The premise of mannerist cryptography is that the letters of the alphabet are secret divine messages that can be read if combined in the correct way. However, the real question for the student of seventeenth-century English poetry is how much attention it receives from students of seventeenth-century European literature, what results emerge from analyses carried out using Hocke’s litmus tests, and what kind of prospective affiliations appear possible. Judging from Hocke’s study, it might seem at first that there is, in fact, not much in the way of English Mannerism to be found, and in particular that, in the great period of European Mannerism – the second half of the seventeenth century – there is no English benchmark figure. Hocke 9

Mannerism therefore equals disorderly and wild fancy (labyrinthine, exaggerated, complicated, enriched), whereas Atticism is analogous to controlled sobriety. Daedalus is the mythic prototype of Mannerism.

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mentions Donne and Shakespeare only by the way, and completely omits any reference to Herbert,10 the closest there is to a mannerist. So, he takes a great leap forward to Hopkins, who, he says, must have known Gracián in depth. ‘In Hopkins echoic lines abound. His poetry is a treasure chest of formal mannerisms’, he says. In reality, Hocke later postulates the existence of a group of genuine mannerists – Shakespeare, Crashaw, Hopkins and, above all, Joyce. The last two are, of course, not seventeenth-century writers. The witticisms or euphuisms of Romeo and Juliet are re-branded Mannerism, and he finds traces of  ‘alchemic-Hermetic elements’ everywhere in Shakespeare. He goes on to say that Shakespeare presents an evolution from an early mannerist period to later Baroque. John Dee (1527–1608) is one of the few known practitioners of Hermetic Alexandrianism, and, according to Hocke, was revered by the English Metaphysicals. Hocke’s book, incidentally, is not without flaws, of which the most serious is the widening of the term ‘mannerist’ so that it no longer refers to a specific, circumscribed artistic phenomenon of the mid-seventeenth century, but is freed of all constraints of time and place and comes to mean ‘dazzling verbal acrobatics’, especially with a touch of the occult thrown in. Hocke is clearly an admirer of Mario Praz, indeed a learned acolyte whose main achievement seems to be the piling up of examples or mere aphorisms – often left unglossed – by writers who, by this very inclusion, automatically become mannerists, without any reasoned justification being given. Some of his short chapters on Mannerism in music are interesting, the essence of which would appear to be what comes between the musical form of the ricercare (without a central point, and ‘alogical’ in so far as it expresses freedom from fixed norms) and the Baroque fugue with its strict structural rules. It is, however, surprising, to say the least, that a follower in the footsteps of Praz should fail to examine the phenomenon of Mannerism in the visual arts. 7. The so-called ‘Cambridge Platonists’ were in search of an alliance between philosophy and religion.11 One of them, Herbert of Cherbury, examined the concept of ‘universal consensus’, which is inborn and given 10 11

He states explicitly that figural poetry is mannerist. See § 158.3 for their connections with the Romantics.

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to us by God as the basis of truth. This was tantamount to studying the elements common to all religions, starting with the fact that religion itself is common to all peoples and in all ages. John Smith, much admired by Matthew Arnold, maintained that God is a form of transcendental consciousness deriving from sensations: other Platonists like Cudworth and More, going against Hobbes, proclaimed the real existence of God and the soul. Joseph Glanville, on whom Arnold based his ‘scholar gipsy’, was a natural theologian who paved the way for Thomas Browne. Although Milton had met Galileo in Florence, nonetheless, for impelling poetic needs, the universe he presents in Paradise Lost is largely Ptolemaic; this points to a situation of angst and instability similar to Donne’s many years before. Thomas Browne himself is capable of extremely modern intuitions along with disconcerting, childish leftovers from the Middle Ages. Renaissance individualism is counterbalanced by a sense of human limitations. The poetics of the time made a clear distinction between the mythological poets of antiquity, who dressed truth up in fine fables, and modern poets who denounced their demise. The threat of a possible obsolescence of poetic imagination, and the decline of poetry itself, was to haunt the early Victorians after being discounted by the Romantics. Macaulay’s famous aphorism comes to mind, in which he states that poetry declines as civilization progresses. God and the soul were not included in the agenda of the Royal Society, and poetry became philosophy tout court. Fancy was demoted by Hobbes, and ‘judgement’ took its place.12 § 3. The Spenserians The founder of a literary movement is bound to have followers. Although this may not apply to Shakespeare, at least not patently, it is true as regards Chaucer (the English and Scottish Chaucerians in Volume 1 of this History), Jonson and above all Sidney and Spenser. Of all the 12

The first meetings of the Royal Society were held during the Protectorate; the Royal Patent was granted in 1662. Among its members were the biographer Aubrey, the philosopher Locke, the diarists Pepys and Evelyn, the architect Wren, and the poet Dryden. Newton, whose epistemology is based on the reconciliation of religion with science, became a member in 1684.

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former, only the Scottish Chaucerians were poets of any worth, while the Jonsonians and, especially, the early seventeenth-century Spenserians were undoubtedly second-class writers. Of course, any label will include quite different personalities and will be, in some respects, unsatisfactory. We know of the close friendship between Wither and William Browne, but of nothing similar between them and Drummond and the Fletchers. Drummond was reclusive and selective; he was ambitious, and his friends tended to be established classicists like Sir William Alexander1 and, above all, Jonson. While some of them did write lengthy poems, they were not exactly the kind of poems written by Spenser: the two Fletchers wrote one each, both so bizarre as to be quite new. The fact is that no one could or indeed wanted to be a replica of Spenser; too much water had flown under the bridge since then, and in that water had swum Donne and Jonson, to mention only the greatest. Donne as a poet was not yet in print, but was read in manuscript in London, where the Spenserians, all of them born outside the capital, ended up living. So their poetry is eclectic and heterogeneous. Only William Browne attempted something approaching a Spenserian poem, and it is possible that the three books of this Britannia’s Pastorals were to be followed by others (a fourth was left unfinished, just as the Faerie Queene was). The sonnet, too, follows the Spenserian or Sidneyan mould. But almost all the Spenserians take to composing in genres unknown to the author of the Faerie Queene, like the masque or the epigram. On the other hand, from Spenser onwards, the Puritan vein becomes more pronounced. Spenser was anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish, as was Wither, only more so. On the whole, the Spenserians may be seen as the counterpart of the more cynical Jacobean dramatists, who, while making poetic justice triumph in the end, depict a world dominated and dilapidated by dishonesty, machiavellism, duplicity and especially by lust, with men perpetually aroused

1

Scottish secretary of state from 1626, William Alexander (1567–1640) was the author of a collection of songs and sonnets in 1604, a poem on the (Last) Judgement in eight-line stanzas, and four plays with classical subjects and characters, served up in watered-down Senecan sauce reminiscent of Robert Garnier. Echoes of Alexander’s plays are purported to be traceable in Webster’s two masterpieces, written not long after.

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and women little better than whores. The Spenserians stand guard on a pseudo-Platonic Puritanism, which sees women restored to their pedestal of purity and angel-like chastity. For this reason, the four poets that will be discussed now are ‘moral’, indirectly speaking, but not ‘religious’ (except for Wither and Drummond in their final period). Nor are they devotional, although the two Fletchers were Anglican priests. Obviously they were also fervently patriotic, united by their respective debuts with elegies mourning the premature death of Prince Henry.2 From Spenser these poets take inspiration for hymns to spiritual beauty and pastoral eclogues. Essentially, they absorb Spenserianism in metrical form; they inherit the Spenserian stanza but proceed to modify it: the two Fletchers, for example, cut one, sometimes, two lines, and change the rhyme scheme. § 4. Wither George Wither (1588–1667), a man of action as well as being a thinker, lived an appropriately adventurous and complicated life. Fierce polemicist, fervid, fearless Puritan, impulsive and Quixotic, he was also the author of delicate, exquisitely wrought descriptions of the English countryside. He was born into a landowning family, went up to Oxford, without, however, completing his studies, and subsequently entered one of the Inns of Chancery. In 1612 and 1613 he wrote two elegies, one on the death of Prince Henry, the other for the marriage of Princess Elizabeth. His first mishap was to write and publish in 1611 a series of twenty satires against private vices and public misdemeanours, which were held to be detrimental to the reputation of someone very important (no actual personal correspondence has ever been established). This cost him a few months in the Marshalsea. While there, he conceived the idea of a pastoral dialogic poem, The Shepherd’s Hunting (1615), in which for the first time Wither dons the mask of Phil’arete (lover of virtue). In all likelihood, the pastoral mode responded to a deeply felt inspiration in Wither, but it also served as a screen from behind which to attack his previous targets, vice and corruption. The five eclogues show Phil’arete’s love of hunting; he tells the other

2

First son of James I, he died in 1612, aged eighteen, of typhoid fever.

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shepherds about his dogs, which are personifications of vices and virtues, like the wild beasts in Dante. In 1621 another satire, Wither’s Motto,1 caught the attention of the authorities, and the author was again imprisoned. His Motto, though, sold 30,000 copies, at least according to him. After he was released he used the character of Phil’arete once more in Fair Virtue, or The Mistress of Phil’arete (1622), which represents perhaps the best of Wither as a lyric poet. The diction is characterized by apparently maudlin simplicity, not without the occasional well-aimed barb: ‘I am no Italian lover / That will mew thee in a jail; / But thy beauty I discover, / English-like, without a veil’. Speaking through this mask Wither spurns all temptations of the flesh and takes on the role of the preacher launching anathemas against vice, especially lust. The poem begins with a long, pleasant prelude in which the poet describes a landscape, pointing out and naming flowers, plants, unsullied brooks and lakes. Then comes an ecstatic panegyric to his loved one, which goes on and on, and becomes wearisome, especially as there are no striking images, just a series of commonplaces conveyed by trundling heroic couplets. Not that Wither is incapable of variation: he inserts songs with echo effects and even a diamond-shaped one in the style of Herbert. Tautological and hyperbolic verses weave the praises of unsophisticated, natural female beauty. Make-up and trinkets hide rather than enhance the beauty, which is divided into its anatomical components, but emerges, sharply defined, as beauty of the mind, celestial or spiritual beauty, and the triumph of modesty. The poet ends up by confessing that the woman of the poems has no name and never actually appears (in the poem Phil’arete converses with various nymphs) because she is only an idea, a woman so pure and of such rarefied beauty that she could never exist in flesh and blood. 2. According to Wither himself, the year 1622 marks the end of his Juvenilia period (which accounts for nearly 1,000 pages in the first complete edition published in the nineteenth century), after which he became a more committed Puritan polemicist. 1628 saw the publication of an 1

The motto in question is: Nec habeo, nec careo, nec curo; some editions have a frontispiece bearing another motto which contains a play on words on his surname: ‘I grow and wither both together’.

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extravagant visionary poem that is also a documentary of the 1625 plague. There followed (1635) a Collection of Emblems, the forerunner of a new genre, and, in Holland, in 1641, a book of religious verse, Halelujah, with paraphrases of psalms and some original songs. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Wither was a convinced Parliamentarian, and had no hesitation in selling some of his land in order to recruit a small cavalry regiment. He was arrested by the royalists, and only escaped the gallows thanks to a quip made by Denham,2 to the effect that as long as Wither lived there was in England a worse poet than him (Denham himself ). In subsequent phases of the war, Wither was anything but heroic, but nonetheless received an indemnity from Parliament. During Cromwell’s regime his position became more radical and egalitarian. At the Restoration he was arrested and spent three years in prison. On his release he became an Anglican with leanings towards Quakerism. In these nearly forty years Wither wrote a huge amount, a chaotic and eclectic hotchpotch dominated by polemicist prose.3 His reputation was awful right up to the end of the nineteenth century (or, more precisely, up to the publication of Lamb’s short rehabilitation of his work): he was considered a kind of buffoon. His contemporary, Jonson, was quick to mock his works as fast they appeared, and Wither was not backward in responding. The anecdote about Denham says it all. Pope repeats the negative opinion in the Dunciad. Palgrave included only one poem by Wither, a few misogynistic verses which are hardly representative, put into the mouth of a love-sick shepherd in the 1622 poem. However, today Wither is valued for his nature scenes which foreshadow Wordsworth and Burns, and for the passionate intensity of his pastoral mouthpieces. § 5. William Browne If a poet is labelled a Spenserian, then some connection with Keats is sure to be lying in wait. William Browne (1591–1645 – both dates conjectural – born in Tavistock, Devon) is often presented as the link between the two. Browne lived for a while in France, graduated from Oxford, was a member 2 3

Or – for GSM, 92 – Waller. In his bland, benevolent pages on Wither, Baugh gives a detailed account of these prose writings (BAUGH, vol. II, 639–41).

§ 5. William Browne

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of the Inns of Court, tutor to the son of a nobleman, and twice married. This is all we know. The last twenty years of his life are shrouded in mystery. He was a man of formidable scholarship, a collector of old manuscripts with the vocation of an antiquary.1 His literary production is immense, and was only brought to the attention of the ordinary reader in its entirety at the end of the eighteenth century. Some of his works could be read by his admirers only in manuscript, and were therefore confined to an elite.2 His first work was The Shepherd’s Pipe (1614), a miscellany containing, as we have just seen, one or more eclogues by Wither, writing under the pastoral pseudonym of Roget. For James I he wrote an exquisite mythological masque on Ulysses’ arrival on Circe’s island (performed at the Inner Temple, of which he was a member),3 a collection of Shakespearean sonnets, and other occasional poems and songs, including a solemn elegy and an epitaph for Sidney’s sister. These poems show the influence not of Spenser or Donne, but of Jonson (some critics have expressed doubts as to whether they are indeed by Browne). The poetic voice here is not pastoral; some parts are visionary, grotesque, even sarcastic, in Jonson’s pithiest style, together with epistles with bizarre titles recounting banal, everyday occurrences, such as ‘An Epistle thrown into a River in a Ball of Wax’. The several odd epigrams include one addressed to a ‘hanged rope-maker’. 2. Britannia’s Pastorals, his most important work, was begun before he was twenty years old; two books of songs were published in 1613 and 1616, while fragments of a third remained in manuscript until 1852. Here Browne eschews the Spenserian nine-line stanza in favour of easy-flowing couplets of a kind that Keats would like. Of all the Spenserians – many of whom he knew personally, and who wrote commendatory verses which appear at the beginning of the three books4 – Browne is most successful

1 2 3 4

An admirer of Hoccleve, Browne brought to light one of his poems and published it in The Shepherd’s Pipe, saying he was ready to publish more – even the complete works, if he was asked to! The first complete edition of the works was, and remains, The Poems, ed. G. Goodwin and A. H. Bullen, 2 vols, London 1894. The Inner Temple Masque (1615), in MS until 1772. Browne reciprocates the praise in a digression in the second canto of Book II.

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in creating graceful, delicate, candid, agreeable poetry. Echoing in verse some plot elements of Sidney’s Arcadia, the poem narrates, rather aimlessly, the stories of various shepherds and shepherdesses. In the end, one is left with admiration for the descriptive qualities, the sense of colour, the often funny, Biedermeier-like anecdotes (the heroine lovingly fed by a robin), the long Homeric or Dantesque similes, and the amusing misunderstandings.5 Behind the story of Marina, spurned in love by Celandine and saved by the god of the river, then thrust into the Spenserian monster’s cavern, lies the age-old Gothic archetype of the virgin in distress and of the dying glimmers of a Golden Age (beginning of the fourth canto of Book I). Devon is greeted and honoured in the prologue as the cradle of many heroes and navigators of the end of the sixteenth century, against a background of a ‘weak piping time of peace’. The monotony of the couplets weighed down by erudition and scraps of mythology is often punctuated by the use of alternative verse forms, as in the fine hymn of the river god on the multifarious forms of life to be found in the water. The poet, as if with the complicity of the reader, juggles carefully between the ‘suspension of disbelief ’ and the register of objectivity. His poetic world is pitted with extraneous elements that do nothing but break the spell and leave the reader wondering. § 6. Drummond of Hawthornden It is not immediately clear why William Drummond (1585–1649, called ‘of Hawthornden’ after his place of birth) – a literally Metaphysical poet, much given to speculative meditation, mostly on death – is usually classified as a Spenserian. If anything, he should be considered a follower of Sidney, as he was practically the last English poet to write a series of sonnets to his loved one. However, if ‘Spenserian’ does not quite fit him, to call him

5

Or the bathetic solutions such as that of Celandine who, after an appearance at the beginning, is absent from the poem for more than two books; he then returns to look for his beloved Marina, and in the land of the Fairies comes across a sleeping Spenser. Perhaps as a homage, the second and last cantos of this third book are in ottava rima. The book breaks off after about 300 lines, and before Marina is saved from the monster.

§ 6. Drummond of Hawthornden

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‘Sidneyan’1 is equally unsatisfying, though it is pointless to deplore his belatedness, as if centuries separated him from the classic English sonneteers.2 It might be more useful to see him as a pre-Romantic 200 years ahead of his time, or a Romantic akin to Shelley and already using his lyre; or even a decadent ante litteram, or a precocious existentialist, and an investigator of the relationship between man and the cosmos. The perspicacious definition given of him as ‘literary epicure’3 brings to mind Huysmans’s Des Esseintes. Drummond became a recluse when still young and spent his life reading and writing, a forerunner of all those future poets who were to discover a vocation in themselves only to realize that they have taken a wrong turning. One of his sonnets praises his hermitage, ‘Where from the vulgar I estranged live’; his dream was to be part of an aristocracy of the mind, which he sought and found in his friendship with some of the most renowned writers of the day (Alexander, Drayton, Jonson above all),4 who became frequent guests in his home. Although a Scot, he deliberately wrote a refined, classical English that was devoid of all trace of regionalism. He may be said to be the greatest Scottish writer after Dunbar and before Burns. His vantage point was above and beyond the petty squabbles of his fellow countrymen, for he had travelled far and knew the world. Untouched by Scottish patriotism, he was an anti-nationalist and an anti-Calvinist. His first emotional involvement with death came with the loss of his father and his fiancée, remembered and lamented in several of his poems; after a ritual elegy on Prince Henry, Drummond writes of his fiancée while still alive 1

2

3 4

More Sidneyan than Spenserian according to W. C. Ward, in the introduction (vol. I of two, xv–cxxv) of his edition of Drummond’s works (London 1894), and F. R. Fogle, A Critical Study of William Drummond of Hawthornden, New York 1952, 11–14, 39. Drummond wrote nothing to compare with the Faerie Queene, and the only work which is in any way Spenserian (the Spenser of the Hymns) is the Hymn of the Fairest Fair, on beauty as the moving force of life. Praz in particular insisted on this definition of Drummond: a late or belated sonneteer (cf. PSL, 236, and PMI, 14, 202). Jonson was the first to open the wound, saying his poetry ‘smelled too much of the Schools, and [was] not after the fancie of the time’. CHI, vol. IV, 151. Volume 1, § 120.1.

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and after her death. His last work is a prose meditation on death. Mortality, therefore, becomes in Hawthornden a leitmotif, like love in Leopardi’s ‘Il pensiero dominante’, sadly but firmly repeated. 2. The Drummond family boasted illustrious monarchic traditions. The father, subsequently appointed gentleman usher of the court, was part of the cortège that had accompanied James to London on his accession to the English throne in 1603. After graduating from Edinburgh, he studied law in France. On the death of his father he became laird of the family estate, and abandoned the pursuit of law to dedicate himself to study and to writing. His inspiration was first his love for his betrothed and then her untimely death. His book of poems, published in 1616 in two parts and several sections, in various metres and genres (mostly fine madrigals), was divided into the ‘Life’ and ‘Death’ of his bride-to-be. Much later (in 1632) Drummond married another woman, but by then he too was a different man and poet. The 1616 sonnets, undoubtedly more imitative of Petrarch, Guarini and Marino than those of other collections, use their sources gracefully while maintaining the author’s own personality.5 They are also innovative in that they do away with the paraphernalia of the traditional sonnet, choosing not to employ the pastoral, idealized mask, or even to give the name of the loved one; they are lyricism pure and mature. The first part consists of fifty-five sonnets, the second of only thirteen, plus madrigals and songs. In reality there is no obvious break between the two parts: the poet is pensive, melancholy, sad, even before the tragedy of her death; a prey to fears and black thoughts, joyless, deprived of fulfilment, he observes the cosmos as it drifts towards extinction. His sonnets are the celebration and recollection of an occasion long sought, of some tragic, prophesized event. Indeed, A Cypress Grove begins by expressing the certainty that the soul may have forebodings of coming disasters or dangers. Flowers of Sion (1623) is thoroughly imbued with orthodox, that is, Christianized, Platonism, and ponders the transience of human life in a way that recalls Herbert in the anaphoric lists of the material beauties that

5

The sonnet form is, by and large, Shakespearean, with varying rhyme schemes in the three quatrains and final couplet.

§ 7. The Fletchers

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fade and die, and Donne in several paraphrases of the Gospel pertaining to the nativity, passion, death and resurrection of Christ. 3. After 1623 Drummond’s literary career was interrupted, or rather, took a new direction for the next twenty-five years. Among his other works, only an account of a very Scottish nature’s welcome to the visiting King James, Forth Feasting (1617), stands out in any way. The already mentioned A Cypress Grove is an essay in the manner of Bacon or Montaigne, which presents an undulatory concept of the human psyche. The long list of self-invitations to resignation, given the universal vanity, echoes the biblical Book of Ecclesiastes. Other verses of pomp and circumstance were prompted by a visit to Scotland in 1633 by Charles I. Drummond also wrote a History of Scotland, published after his death, and in various pamphlets he voiced ever louder opposition to the Presbyterians and support for the royalist cause. Drummond was no closet or declared Puritan like the English Spenserians; in the Civil War he was either on the King’s side or equidistant. This serious, solid, respectable man of letters was credited with a posthumous, macaronic poem, Polemo Middinia inter Vitarvam et Nebernam (1684). Nor should we forget that this melancholy dreamer was also an inventor, and took out sixteen patents for various items of military machinery, among which the machine gun and the torpedo. § 7. The Fletchers The Fletchers form part of a small but productive dynasty of early seventeenth-century writers; the father of John, the playwright who collaborated with Beaumont and Shakespeare, was the brother to Giles Fletcher the Elder (1548–1611), the great eclectic scholar, Professor of Greek at Cambridge and diplomat in the service of the Queen. The account of one of his missions to Russia was incorporated into the travel books of both Hakluyt and Purchas. Fletcher the Elder was a poet too, and published a sonnet sequence (Licia, 1593). ‘Elder’ is used for him, as for Palma and Bruegel, to distinguish him from one of his sons, also called Giles (1584– 1623), who, with his younger brother, Phineas (1582–1650), appeared on the literary scene in 1603 with a poetic miscellany celebrating the passing of the crown from Elizabeth to James. After graduating, Giles was ordained and held a position at the church of St Mary in Cambridge. He

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was renowned for his piety and for his preaching. Like his father before him, he became Professor of Greek at that university. In 1610 he published Christ’s Victory and Triumph, in Heaven, in Earth, over and after Death, consisting of four cantos, with stanzas of eight decasyllabic lines, of which the three final ones rhyme and the last is an alexandrine. Though the verse form and the personifications are Spenserian, the imaginative model can be traced back to Du Bartas and his Semaine in the English translation by Sylvester.1 Both brothers succeeded in bringing a personal note to what otherwise would have been mere imitation, and the poem by Giles not only abounds in anticipatory echoes of Milton but foreshadows, in its dreamy, comfortable visions of Heaven, the future Pre-Raphaelites. This, the first great religious epic, introduces what were to become characteristic features of the genre, like the connection between paganism and Christianity by means of a network of parallelisms (Ganymede foreshadows the Ascension as Deucalion does Noah), and the definition of the divine as a combination of contradictions and oxymora. It must be read from the very beginning, with the solemn introduction of the classic, essential alternative present in all English religious poetry up to the end of the nineteenth century, and personified by the Janus-like Jehovah, who is both terrible and tender. A similar ambivalence is embodied in the figures of Justice and Mercy. Human and divine actions are exemplified through the use of theological puns, as in the rhetorical question whether a ‘depraved’ man must always be ‘deprived’ (of Grace). In the second canto, the lush garden of Presumption – an episode which is drawn out and decorated – is taken from Spenser and from Italian Renaissance poetry. The third canto exploits inverted parallelisms in sacred history, topoi that would become familiar in the nineteenth century, like the Tree of Knowledge that becomes the Tree of the Cross. The narrative tempo of this canto is brisk and not without suspense, with paraphrases taking the place of allegory and personification. Heavenly bliss is illustrated in further lists of oxymora.

1

This influence is extended to the Spenserians as a whole by J. Grundy, The Spenserian Poets, London 1969, 43–4, where Drayton is included (with reservations and restrictions [107]), but Drummond of Hawthornden is not.

§ 7. The Fletchers

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2. Phineas Fletcher, too, was a clergyman, and, after leaving Cambridge in 1616, spent the rest of his life, starting from 1621, in a rectory in Norfolk. His immense, often highly eccentric production covers a whole range of poetic and prose genres. He wrote a pastoral play for the king in 1614 which was, however, never performed; Locustae, a poem in Latin, was translated into English in 1627 (The Locusts or Apollyonists) in five cantos full of pictures and visions paraphrasing Revelation, and can be seen as rightly belonging to the substantial genre of Elizabethan and Jacobean anti-Catholic and anti-Jesuit literature (cf. Donne’s Ignatius His Conclave),2 much stimulated by the foiled Gunpowder Plot. At the end of an infernal council, Satan forms an alliance with the Jesuits to bring the whole of Europe under his tyrannical rule. The contagion of Catholicism spreads. In the fourth canto another conclave presided over by the Pope decides in favour of the plot, which is foiled in the fifth. It has often been thought, some might say proved, that Milton was inspired by this text for his Satan. Fletcher, though a clergyman, was very much awake to the seductive power of evil; time and again he comes back to a conception of life as a contest, an eternal battle between good and evil, so he needs to keep reminding himself that the human psyche is firmly under control and its functions hierarchically regulated; or that Satan is always defeated, but only after much uncertainty. An erotic poem, Britain’s Ida or Venus and Anchises (1628), about the seduction of Anchises that led to the birth of Aeneas, was attributed to Spenser, to hide the truth that the author was a man of the cloth. Fletcher is best known as the author of The Purple Island,3 a scientific-religious poem published in 1633 but probably written much earlier. With its twelve cantos it is about the same length as a single book of the Faerie Queene. Although it bears the signs of creative genius, it has generally been considered inferior to the work of his brother, and branded frankly unreadable or verging on the ridiculous. It is classified as Spenserian because it presents a pastoral scene through the mouth of a shepherd who sings a song about the long gone Golden Age; each canto begins and ends with a finely wrought, stylized 2 3

Volume 1, § 83.1. Dark red, the colour of the clay used by God to create matter, and, for Fletcher, the colour of blood.

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word-painting. So, Spenserian, certainly; but also Blakean and Joycean.4 The author opens with a barbed reference to the explorers of the day who are so hungry to discover new lands while being ignorant of the island that is Man. Fletcher goes back to the beginning and starts his exploration with the Creation itself. He gives a Lucretian version of the divine creation of matter and human life. With reference to his allegory of the body and the human anatomy (first six books), it would make no sense to criticize his ignorance of contemporary theories on physiology and the circulation of the blood; there are a number of resounding errors that appear to constitute an attack on scientific progress. The spirit of Blake hovers over these first six books. From Book VII the scene is occupied by a vision of the evil forces that are in all men and that are in constant struggle with the forces of good. Personifications abound: Ignorance, Heresy, Concupiscence, a long, imposing parade of allegorical characters, a great feast of pageantry and emblems – each allegorical figure bears a motto explaining the meaning of the allegory itself. By this point it has become quite tiring. It is true that Dante too personifies lust in the figure of the leopard, but in more telling and powerful words, and more economically. In other words, Fletcher is not looking forward to Blake; nor is he looking over his shoulder to Spenser. His eyes seem to be fixed on the distant William Langland. The cosmic battle between good and evil begins with a visionary extravaganza and an unbridled orgy of hallucinations, at the end of which the satanic dragon is defeated and forced to surrender.5 § 8. Suckling An amateur who stands outside the literary arena, an outsider who could afford to mock the fight for fame and fortune of many contemporary 4

5

Coming back to this poem after reading Joyce, one is tempted to see it as a parody – though it is obviously not – and more specifically as a parody of the language of medicine and pseudo-medicine. From the second canto on, Fletcher’s poem, with its very detailed marginal annotations, resembles the second chapter (‘on homework’) of the second part of Finnegans Wake, with its three sets of notes. Fletcher added seven Sannazarian Piscatorie (rather than Pastoral) Eclogs in which he, together with his father and brother, is presented as a fisherman.

§ 8. Suckling

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poets, such was the vaunt and the reality of John Suckling (1609–1642), libertine love poet, not only in the sense of a joyful and unfettered celebration of the sexual urge and its promiscuous satisfaction, or a delightful propitiatory ritual, but in a precocious, Baudelaire-like ennui of the ‘chair triste’. Suckling’s literary vocation was late in coming, almost in extremis, and when it did come it was meteoric. In the short life of this eclectic and talented aristocrat, poetry, it seems, came second to a life of pleasure and action; it was to remain an unproductive curiosity of this multifaceted man. Son of a courtier promoted to Secretary of State, Suckling, like Drummond of Hawthornden, lost his father before he was twenty and inherited the huge family fortune and estate. He spent much time in London in the company of the other Cavalier poets in the court. He travelled in France and Italy, and on his return to England in 1630 was knighted. He then left for Germany with a regiment to provide assistance to Prince Gustavus Adolphus in the Thirty Years War. In the meantime his fame grew as a tombeur de femmes, as a wit at the court of Henrietta Maria, and even more as the best player of cards and bowls in the country: in both these activities, he won enormous sums of money. He abandoned his life of pleasure in 1635 after a violent quarrel with a rival for the hand of the daughter of Sir John Willoughby, and retired to his country estate where he occupied himself in literary pursuits. In 1639, like Wither, he invested much of his fortune in fitting out a troop of 100 horse to support the king’s Scottish campaign. The scanty military success and extravagant and costly equipment of Suckling’s troops caused sniggers in London. In this turbulent decade, Suckling was involved in several episodes to favour the king, as when he attempted to help the Earl of Strafford to escape from the Tower; the attempt was foiled and Suckling was forced to flee the country. After many dangerous as well as romantic adventures – like falling into the clutches of the Inquisition on the one hand and eloping to Spain with a noblewoman on the other – he met his death, according to Aubrey, by poisoning himself in France. 2. The critical edition of his works (Oxford 1971) replaces that of 1910 in two volumes which (with the exception of Selections published in 1836) restored Suckling to the reading public after two and a half centuries of neglect since Fragmenta aurea, published posthumously in 1646. Both

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the 1910 and the 1971 complete works consist of two, not very large volumes, which contain prose works, letters, a philosophical-theological tract against Socinianism, as well as four plays, one of which unfinished, with plots involving mystery, intrigue and the exotic. They were performed, at the expense of the author himself, in a gesture of independence and selfgratification, in the late 1630s. They have never found a place in the canon of English theatre, and are usually mentioned only because they contain several songs which were included in the poetic works. The latter make up a slender volume of short compositions in various metrical forms. Most are poems of ‘decantation’, in which the initial emotion is studied in a subsequent moment of cooling, and thus objectivized. Others simulate greater immediacy in the opening lines and rapid changes of mood, or half-formed thoughts. One of the best and most famous of these battles of wit is ‘I prithee send me back my heart’.1 Suckling does not belong to ‘the tribe of Ben’ mainly because he has no great predisposition for careful, polished style, and gives the impression of an improviser who makes do with shoddy, unpolished lines with no pretence to style. But it is just an impression.2 In actual fact, Suckling leans towards the manner of Donne, albeit tempered and unburdened with subtlety. From Donne he takes the shows of impatience, anger, of rage, even. He foregoes the decorative and the mythological, but accepts his anti-Platonic arguments, stating that love cannot be only spiritual, merely ‘Platonic’, but must be a union of body and mind. More than one poem is based on the use of the extended metaphor, though in such a way that it becomes almost invisible. ‘Love’s World’, for example, is a rather naïve poem which draws a comparison between the lover’s soul and a spit of land assailed by the elements and by the effects of the sun and moon. In the humorous ‘’Tis now, since I sate down’, courting is presented as the lover besieging various parts of his lady’s 1 2

Other genres are verse epistles to fellow poets such as Denham, quips, occasional poems, as well as pornographic epigrams, such as ‘A Candle’, about an erect phallus and what women do with it. ‘Ballad Upon a Wedding’, which is discussed below, is, with its ungrammatical colloquialisms, an unexpected foretaste of Hopkins’s poem ‘The Bugler’s First Communion’ (Volume 6, § 203.2).

§ 8. Suckling

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body. At a closer look, it appears that Suckling is a parodist who echoes and mimics Donne, or Jonson, or Spenser. ‘A Session of the Poets’ is a satire in the style of Pope (or of Byron) of the literary milieu of the 1630s, with Suckling in the role of a dabbling dilettante who affirms, with his habitual disdain, that poetic glory is nothing compared with a lucky strike at bowls or a pair of bewitching eyes. While all the other authors scramble for the laurel crown, Suckling stands aside, and with a wicked twist, has Apollo crown not a poet but a wealthy alderman. The poetic voice itself is both his and not his; it is not his when it becomes a ventriloquist’s or a barber’s, or a peddler’s or that of the half-educated townsman who, in the ‘Ballad Upon a Wedding’, a short dramatic monologue, describes an aristocratic wedding in an account full of Spenserian allusions, humorous thumbnail portraits and witty understatement. 3. Suckling the poet and lover is normally seen as the symbol of the lax, pleasure-seeking, even scandalous life style of the court; he is, therefore, for many, a superficial poet and the author of elegant, biting witticisms. For his contemporaries, he was ‘the most gallant of the age, and the greatest player’. Restoration theatre, too, through the mouthpiece of Congreve, paid homage to him, calling him ‘easy, natural Suckling’. There is another side to him, however, as evinced by several statesmanlike letters, the already mentioned tract against Socinianism, his friendship with thinkers like Falkland and Hales. And what of his suicide? Was this to be expected in someone by definition considered frivolous and cynical? Every time Suckling exalts the sheer physical energy and exuberance of the self-assured lover, he sounds boastful and unscrupulous. In his most famous song he spurs himself to action, banishing mute melancholy; if his siege should fail, then ‘the devil take the woman’. This is no lovesick suitor kneeling in tears before his unattainable Lady; this lover is quick to spurn if refused. Suckling’s categorical doubt is that an ‘honest’ lover, that is one who is patient and upright, runs the risk of missing opportunities for pleasure. He will be crowned, ironically, for not having any conquest to his name. The terms ‘kind’ and ‘honest’ are transformed by the ironic vision and applied above all to the lover who is content to love without being loved, and who boasts about it too! In the long run, Suckling is almost always on the point of unmasking the flame of love, while hoping to extinguish it. If all the lover’s tricks and guile fail,

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then best forget it. His first ‘sonnet’ tells of being vaccinated: ‘It is mere cozenage all’. ‘A Farewell to Love’ presents the visionary metamorphosis of a lady whose beauty is violently sullied. ‘Proffered Love Rejected’ – the story anticipates Browning – shows money being offered for sex with a beautiful woman, and being turned down; the lover’s desire wanes with time and in the end it is the woman who begins to burn and offers herself, free, to the lover, only to be met with a refusal. The equally famous ‘Out upon it!’ is an exclamation of amazement at having been constant in love despite rebuffs for three whole days. Anyone who peruses Suckling’s works as a whole will see that some poems are clearly contradicted by ones that follow: the poem I have just referred to is trumped by a point by point retort, to the effect that constancy in love is folly and ridiculous. It is almost as if Suckling had intercepted Montaigne’s new theories of the undulatory nature of the human psyche, rocked by an unceasing battle between nature and passion, and painfully aware of its fragility; aware too that surface hides depth (‘Loving and Beloved’). Counterpart to the poems vaunting male assurance are others in which the poet admits to the superiority of women: he is at their mercy. While appearing to claim victory he is conscious of how much unhappiness and disgust is caused by love, whether requited or not. Fulfilment of desire is fleeting, so it is better to feel desire without satisfying it. ‘Fruition adds no new wealth, but destroys, / And while it pleases much the palate, cloys’. Two poems are entitled, significantly, ‘Against fruition’. § 9. Lovelace There are many apparent similarities as well as many differences between Suckling and Richard Lovelace1 (1618–1657), quite apart from the fact that they constitute the vanguard of the Cavalier poets. They were not friends, it seems: Suckling was nine years older than Lovelace, and died fifteen years before him. Their paths never crossed. They both came from wealthy, influential families in the south of England (Norfolk and Kent), were educated at different preparatory schools but the same university, and belonged naturally to the same monarchist party. Both tried their hand at 1

Biographical notes come chiefly from Anthony à Wood, with various errors rectified in the course of time.

§ 9. Lovelace

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writing for the theatre (Lovelace wrote two plays of which we have only fragments, practically just the titles), both cultivated poetry as an aristocratic pastime, though Lovelace was no self-confessed libertine, and indeed respected love and honour, even going so far as risk his life for his king, making Suckling’s loyalty seem somewhat false, snobbish, and a matter of routine. In his blind dedication to his ideals, Lovelace resembles Sidney or Ralegh;2 like them he had a variety of interests such as music, falconry and hunting. Both died young (Lovelace at forty). Lovelace became famous for his legendary beauty and charisma that acted like a magnet, making him everyone’s favourite.3 He went to school with Crashaw, who was a little older than him. More will be said on this friendship later. Once at court, he offered his services to the king in the two Scottish wars. When he returned to his Kent estate he was delegated to present to Parliament a petition in favour of the restoration of the old religious practices (called the ‘Kentish Petition’). As a consequence he was sentenced to seven months in prison, followed by a period of house arrest, which prevented him from taking part in the Civil War, though he contributed with vast amounts of money. He left England after the surrender of Oxford, fought for the French against the Spanish and was wounded in action. He returned to England only to be imprisoned once again because of so-called incriminating documents found in his house in London. In prison he spent his time arranging his poems for publication. He was freed after 1649, and died in poverty. 2. Lucasta, the title of a collection of poems first published in 1649, was revised and enlarged by his brother in 1659, and dedicated to Lady Lucy Sacheverell, who, believing him to have been killed in the battle of Dunkirk had married another.4 This figure, real and ideal at the same time, transfused into so many other poetic personifications like Althea,

2 3 4

An echo of Lovelace may be found in a few poems by James Graham, Marquess of Montrose (1612–1650). The two poets are so similar that Walter Scott attributed Lovelace’s most famous ‘Farewell’ to Montrose. Samuel Richardson was to use his name and character for the unscrupulous suitor of Clarissa in the novel of the same name. Anthony à Wood suggested that the name could be split into Lux (‘light’) and casta (‘chaste’).

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Flora, Amarantha or Gratiana, had great talismanic power for Lovelace and gave rise to a cycle of inspired poems still remembered and quoted by a large number of readers. From Donne, Lovelace takes a much-used topos, the farewell to his loved one dictated by duty or loyalty to his sovereign. Lovelace is steeped in this Sehnsucht, and is torn like Donne, while insisting that the union of the two lovers is strong in spite of their separation.5 ‘To Lucasta, going beyond the seas’ is the most Donne-like, terse and conceptualized of Lovelace’s poems, as can be seen in the use of logical argument and in the specific terms borrowed from the style and vocabulary of his model. In ‘To Lucasta, going to the wars’ he asks forgiveness for being inconstant; his duty is to a higher loyalty, to his king, and thus he is guilty of a most honourable disloyalty. According to the ancient knightly code, honour comes above all: ‘I could not love thee, Dear, so much, / Lov’d I not honour more’. For Lovelace, honour, which is both Lucasta’s chastity and his duty as a soldier, is the same as that rejected by Suckling, as a giant feeding only on air. The last stanza of  ‘Althea, from prison’ states scornfully that freedom is an inner dimension and value and that the freedom of the human soul that loves is equalled only by the angels.6 Few other poems indeed may be added to those I have quoted from a corpus of almost 200 titles. Of a small bestiary (the snail, ant, hawk, toad and spider) the one that has survived is the Aesopian fable of the cricket, which masks nostalgia for the good old days and forecasts the Puritan axe that is about to fall. Other aspects of the feminine are present in Herrick-like close-ups, such as Lucasta’s muff and beauty-spot. Lovelace becomes more captivating each time he approaches the chaste, reasonable Metaphysical manner of elementary, though ingeniously apparent, contradictions, in relatively short poems showing considerable metrical variety;7 but this equation becomes rarer and rarer. Some of his poems were set to music, but Lovelace’s

5 6 7

‘unconfined’ is an adjective often used by Lovelace to describe love. It also identifies the Golden Age in ‘Love Made in the First Age: To Chloris’. Lovelace’s hyperboles are resounding, categorical, delirious, of ‘impassionate eloquence’, like those of Marlowe fifty years earlier. The final parts of poems that are longer than three or four stanzas are often superfluous and forced.

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reputation has plummeted through the years. Even his most ardent admirers admit that most of his poems are not only forgettable, but are damaging to his overall image. Apart from the gems I have referred to here, written in a state of grace, Lovelace is almost always incapable of controlling his craving for analogies, and indulges in witticisms and ridiculous conceits that weaken the fame of Donne and quite crush Crashaw. In the Lucasta poems, where his style is terse and unadorned, Lovelace is superb; elsewhere, his verse is often opaque and laboured, a far cry from the ever clear and flowing Suckling. Many of Lovelace’s poems are in the form of riddles, or long, extended metaphors, sometimes highly eccentric, obscure and most unexpected. In short, Lovelace is a master of bathos. § 10. Carew* A poet firmly established in the court rather than in the countryside or in a rectory, and therefore the very opposite of Herrick or Herbert, Thomas Carew (1594–1640) was the author of a poetry that is, as it were, the mise en abyme or antonomasia of the age of Charles I (much as Van Dyke1 is in painting). Of him it may truly be said that he was as dissolute in life as he was conscientious in the practice of his art, which was essentially that of a love poet, erotic, if not, at times, pornographic. The deeds and writings of this erotomaniac were carefully closeted by his contemporaries, and only now, after centuries, have come to light in their entirety. But if Carew is obsessed with sex, he is also plagued by guilt beneath his mask, as emerges from the few certain biographical facts available to us.2 From a wealthy family, the *

A first edition of the Poems of Carew appeared posthumously in 1640, followed by a second, enlarged, in 1642. The standard modern edition is still that of R. Dunlap, Oxford 1949, 1957. E. I. Selig, The Flourishing Wreath: A Study of Thomas Carew’s Poetry, New Haven, CT 1958; L. Sadler, Thomas Carew, Boston, MA 1979; J. Kerrigan, ‘Thomas Carew’, in Proceedings of the British Academy, LXXIV (1988), Oxford 1989, 311–50.

1 2

Dunlap 1957, lii, quoting H. J. C. Grierson. Complicated by the existence of his namesake Thomas Carey (1597–1634), whose career was similar: he too went to Oxford, was a courtier and favourite of James I, whose unpublished poems he transcribed. Shortly before his death, James appointed him ambassador to Venice. The composer Henry Lawes set to music the poems of both.

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son of a lawyer, he followed the usual course of studies, and matriculated at Merton College, Oxford. His father complained that at twenty he was a madcap who showed no signs of settling down. He became secretary to the English ambassador in Italy (where he visited Venice, Florence, Naples, Rome and Turin) and The Hague. In 1616, after three years’ service, he was dismissed for slander and other unacceptable behaviour (including, perhaps, an affair with the ambassador’s wife). He entered the service of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, accompanying him to France from 1619 to 1624. Both periods spent on the Continent were fruitful: Carew got to know some of his fellow writers and came into direct contact with the recent, militant poetry of both literatures (and with Marino, who was in Paris at the time). In 1630, after a few years living a bohemian-style existence in London, he was given a position at court with the rather strange title of ‘taster-in-ordinary’ (a kind of personal servant or valet) to the king. The special favour which the Queen extended to him was owed to the fact that one night Carew supposedly put out a candle to prevent the king, who was just about to enter the royal bedchamber, from seeing his wife in the arms of her lover. Carew was a friend of Jonson and the other Cavalier poets, and his poems, circulated in manuscript, gained him the accolade of virtual Poet Laureate. In all likelihood he died of syphilis, and, in the words of the historian Clarendon, tormented by remorse for his dissolute life. He was refused absolution and Extreme Unction by Hales.3 His erotic, sensuous poems contrast strikingly with his translations, or rather, ‘paraphrases’ of the Psalms (only one of the aspects of Carew that recall Wyatt). 2. Carew addressed a subtly imitative panegyric to the recently dead Donne, in which he pronounced him ‘monarch of wit’ who had left no heirs, while, of course, Carew himself was the wit of his court by antonomasia. Donne had cut the dead branches of the Petrarchan tradition and done away with the weeds that strangled English poetry, bringing fresh vigour. Carew’s philosophy of love hinges on the eternal unity of lovers’ souls even 3

In reality ‘The Second Rapture’ shamelessly invokes, not gold, fortune, honour, or long life – fleeting gifts, ‘semblances of happiness’ – but a thirteen-year-old girl who can make an old man’s blood race and restore his appetite, and in whose arms he can die: ‘This is true bliss, and I confess / There is no other happiness’.

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when – in the occasional ‘Farewells’ – their bodies are separated.4 From Jonson, to whom he dedicated an affectionate but balanced ode while he was still living, he acquired the architectonics of verse. In Carew we witness an escalation: his poems are aesthetically more mature and show that he has assimilated and metabolized the need for unity of form; unmistakable are the signs of labor limae and ‘suffering and fatigue’, whereas those of Suckling (the author of the phrase in quotation marks) and, especially, of Lovelace, always bring with them an impression of improvisation, however splendid. Carew is now accepted as an artist in the original sense of the word, that is, a maker of artefacts. Of all his contemporaries, he is the most attentive to proportion and measurement; he is never confused or vague, and avoids the use of extravagant conceits. The exquisitely modelled and adorned short songs – some of them indeed very short – were ideal for being set to music and sung. In the course of time, readers and critics were satisfied with such an aproblematic appreciation of a poet who filtered and distilled the urgency of sexual desire in immaculate euphemisms and finely wrought constructs. He was a man of peace although he did in fact fight alongside the king in the first Bishops’ War; he was not a soldier poet, a fervent defender of Charles, ready, like Lovelace to take up ‘a sword, a horse and a shield’. The spell cast by his poems was in general recognized in English anthologies, only slightly tainted by a few timid objections to a monotonous, repetitive style that soon wearies, and by a limited emotional range and imagination. Subsequent sociological and political interpretations have overturned our 4

In ‘To my Mistress in Absence’ the reader half expects the simile of the legs of the compass to pop up, but it doesn’t. As in Donne, the two lovers are ‘canonized’ and therefore contrasted with ‘gross lovers’. In the other poems of the collection, however, the woman is the lodestar of the storm-tossed ship. Donne’s most famous metaphor, that of the compass, is repeated verbatim in ‘Excuse of Absence’, discovered among his manuscripts. In ‘The Ribband’, which follows on from the two Donne poems, ‘The Funeral’ and ‘The Relique’, a complicated conceit contrasts the perishable silk band worn round their wrists by the two lovers with the undying union of their souls: one ‘moves like air’, the other ‘as the centre stands’. ‘The fly that flew into my mistress’ eye’ in turn echoes Donne’s flea: once it has sucked from the lady’s face ‘the incense and the spice’, it becomes a bird of paradise. The dialogue between Donne and Carew goes on and on.

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view of a poet intent on making time stand still in a kind of fenced-in, soundproofed Eldorado. In other words Carew gave voice to an instinctive but ideologically based reaction against the unnatural Puritan ethos; between the lines of his poems he debates the cultural model of his time, studying and proposing a restoration or refounding, or even the maintaining of the status quo. ‘A Rapture’, which has been judged the most pornographic poem of the age (it is, however, pornography behind a veil of metaphor and periphrasis, untouched by vulgarity) is at the same time, as we shall see, a new discussion on the code of honour, a value deflated by Suckling and trumpeted by Lovelace. Carew quotes verbatim the ‘giant’ mentioned by Suckling,5 and discredits, indeed demystifies it: it is a false value, a fetish handed down through the centuries in order to limit the sexual freedom of women, and is also against true religion. As an individual, Carew defends his instincts and desires against a society that tramples them underfoot. In 1634 he wrote a masque, Coelum Britannicum, and, with the collaboration of Inigo Jones and the music of Henry Lawes, had it performed before the king and the court. In it, the apotheosis of Charles and Henrietta is held back by no less than seven antimasques.6 Carew’s country poems, Jonsonian celebrations of still-surviving traditional aristocratic hospitality, are potent expressions of the theme of a civilization under threat.7 Lovelace, too, in

5 6

7

§ 9.2. Mercury in blank verse and Momo in biting, blown-up, crabbed prose (derived from Giordano Bruno’s Spaccio della bestia trionfante), are the registers of a purifying action of the pagan cosmos in allegorical scenarios which, according to G. Pellegrini, ‘Coelum Britannicum: A Masque at White Hall’, Rivista di letterature moderne e comparate, XV, 2 (1962), 85–107, owe much to Italian sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury mythographies and iconographies, mainly those of Cesare Ripa. Criticism of the Stuart regime permeates the allegory, but with a sudden change of scenery a pageant of English history appears, which starts with the Celts and ends with the present monarchs. The final scenario, the work of Inigo Jones, representing clouds descending from the sky, reforming and going up again, and rocks disappearing under the stage, is however clumsy and pretentious. In ‘To Saxham’ the dominant image is that of après nous le déluge, with the stately home becoming a kind of Noah’s Ark for the local animals.

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his poetic fable of the grasshopper, brings the sickle down on the blind, blissful joie de vivre of his protagonist. 3. The dates of composition of Carew’s poems are difficult to determine with any degree of precision, with the exception of the psalms, which are presumed to belong to a later, maybe final period, though some editors think differently;8 and excepting, too, compositions like the elegies and funeral odes and others that can be dated from internal evidence. His reputation as a poet grew in the first twenty years of his century, but in the last five years of his life his inspiration was clearly waning. The cycle to Celia runs through his production, with various interruptions, and Celia herself was a real person, albeit never identified. The figure is conventional, the name long popular amongst poets and most obviously with Ben Jonson.9 In truth there are no internal times, for this is a Catullian liber characterized by changing moods. It is practically a diary, but with interruptions, pauses and occasional interventions in other veins. The predominant literary mode is the silent dialogue with the loved one, a dialectic ruled by the laws of erotic causerie and poetic courtship. We learn, for example, that according to Caroline usage, it was the woman who permitted the man to declare himself, after which actual courtship may begin, though the result is uncertain. In ‘Eternity of Love’, Carew, like Suckling, proclaims that to love is to perform an action which is not languid, but virile and forceful. The lover’s address may vary from a brisk command to a persuasive invitation, from a tender reproach to the hyperbole of deification. Without Donne’s mimesis, they come across as slight and incorporeal. With few exceptions, Carew is unable to communicate emotional power, perhaps even to feel it; his register is sarcasm, offended pride, sudden flashes of humour, or often a touch of bitterness with which he brings his poem to a hurried end. The Celia poems are sweet-sounding and harmonically pleasing, never tart,

8 9

Dunlap 1957, xxx and xli. For details concerning the recurring name, see Dunlap 1957, xxx n. 2. The bones of this story are that ‘Celia’ was blonde, sang divinely, was welcomed in noble homes, wept when the poet left for France in 1619, but then fell out of love and demanded her love letters back. She married, was unhappy, and Carew resumed his courtship of her. In real life, Carew never married.

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soothing and reassuring like a musical box. In Carew there is almost nothing of the heroic, heartfelt dedication of a cavalier servente to his Lady, who is reminded that, if she has fame and glory, it is thanks to his poetry; and she should remember that the supply of poetry can be interrupted. This verbal construct, that is the loved one’s fame and the loved one herself, is temporary, indeed extemporary and may well disappear. The poet awakes, the suspension ceases. He is a god that only for a moment is slave to the illusion he has created with his words (the poem is entitled ‘Ungrateful Beauty Threatened’). Here Carew quite clearly echoes Donne’s use of religious terminology for profane and erotic purposes: the woman should not think she has attained a state of transcendence and so can command adoration; she remains a human being. It is difficult to think of a more cynical or anti-Petrarchan poem. Verses of protest or admonition alternate with lines of adulation. Carew’s rhetorical weaponry includes surprise, as seen in ‘The Comparison’, which begins as an apparently misogynous poem aimed at demolishing the fascination exercised by women and destroying the traditional wisdom on female beauty; but halfway through all trite classical comparisons are rejected because they diminish the divine beauty of woman, which ‘holds nothing earthly’.10 The poet speaks with the voice of wisdom, or pretends to, and exhorts the lady to carpe diem because all earthly things will pass. And yet, at other times he appeals to the eternity of the love that unites them. Two significant details are the much used adjective ‘fleeting’ and the verb ‘to fade’ in its various forms. Fading is affirmed and confirmed by the transitory, but denied by that which can be made eternal. ‘Ask me no more where Jove Bestows’ is perhaps the most structured poem written in English up to its date; it could be successfully analysed with the methods used by the first twentieth-century formalists based on the recurrence of syntagmatic patterns. The first stanza presents a syntactic-constructive and thematic model which is repeated five times (the number of stanzas in the poem), similar to the highly complex type that was to be used by Dylan Thomas (18 Poems, 1934) in, for example, ‘The 10

Suspense in ‘The Complement’ is created by revealing only at the very end the reason why, and because of which bodily feature, the poet loves his lady, after passing in review her whole anatomy. The answer to this riddle, however, is disappointing.

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force that through the green fuse drives the flower’, where, however, the last stanza modifies and resolves, unlike in Carew, the established syntactic pattern. Carew’s poems hinge more and more on the antithesis between a first stanza that presents a situation or an assertion, and a second beginning with ‘But’ that points a difference. 4. In ‘A Rapture’ the breathless overlapping of the semantic, symbolic, figurative and literal levels evokes the foetal erotic poetry of Dylan Thomas. The metaphors of the bee sucking from flowers, or the loved one who sails his boat to anchor, or the ‘bag of honey’, are archetypal as well as personalized. From an icastic plane the poet modulates to a more prosaic declarative tone, ending with the lapidarian, gnomic sentence: ‘We only sin when Love’s rites are not done’. The philosophy of the union of bodies, the natural sexual realization of love, and the profane creed of sexual enjoyment, all lie pulsating here in an anticipation of D. H. Lawrence, especially in the sting of moral denunciation at the end. In a kind of saccharine souvenir of Donne, Carew speaks of the orgasm as an ‘ecstasie’, with a clear reference to the Donne poem that most resembles Carew’s, whose ode is in reality also a reflection and second paraphrase of Giordano Bruno’s message, evidently perfectly assimilated by Carew. The last fifty lines are dedicated to famous women whose lives were made wretched by their subjection to ‘the goblin Honour’, and whose stories are utopically retold (Lucrece, Penelope, and Daphne). § 11. Herrick* When set alongside the other poets of the early seventeenth century, Robert Herrick (1591–1674) is seen to share some of their characteristics, 1

*

The order of poems of the 1648 edition is followed in Poetical Works, ed. L. C. Martin, Oxford 1956, and, revised, 1965, and in The Complete Poetry, ed. J. M. Patrick, New York 1963, which first used the now standard numerical identification of poems (e.g. H-612) rather than by titles. Both editions have been superseded by The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, ed. R. Connolly and T. Cain, Oxford 2013. F. W. Moorman, Robert Herrick: A Biographical and Critical Study, London 1910, New York 1962; F. Delattre, Robert Herrick, Paris 1912; L. Mandel, Robert Herrick, the Last Elizabethan, Chicago, IL 1927; E. I. M. Easton, Youth Immortal: A Life of Robert Herrick, Boston, MA 1934; S. Musgrove, The Universe of Robert Herrick, Auckland 1950; M. Chute,

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but to lack many more. He stands out as an isolated, eccentric figure; a unicum. To begin with, he was not the son of a bishop, or a clergyman, or a courtier; his father was a goldsmith in Cheapside, one of the poorer parts of London. Stubborn, yet ready to make a virtue of necessity, intransigent and at the same time mild-mannered and calm, he showed promise from an early age. His father having died (he committed suicide by falling out of a window when Herrick was still a baby), he became an apprentice in his uncle’s goldsmith workshop – an auspicious beginning for one who was to become a master craftsman in the art of poetry. In 1613 he turned his back on the family calling, and asked instead to be allowed to study law, which he did at Cambridge, taking at least ten years longer than the average to complete his degree. He decided against a career in the legal profession, which he hated, and, having failed to gain acceptance to the court, chose the ecclesiastical life (1627) without having a real vocation. He withdrew to Devon for many years as priest of the remote parish of Dean Prior.1 Before this, he had led a life of pleasure in the taverns of bohemian London with the ‘sons of Ben’. He willingly gave up all thoughts of promotion and put his mind at rest in his little sinecure, showing himself that he could be a

Two Gentle Men: The Lives of George Herbert and Robert Herrick, London 1960; J. Press, Robert Herrick, London 1961; R. B. Rollin, Robert Herrick, New York 1966, 1992; R. Deming, Ceremony and Art: Robert Herrick’s Poetry, The Hague and Paris 1974; L. DeNeef, ‘This Poetick Liturgie’: Robert Herrick’s Ceremonial Mode, Durham, NC 1974; G. W. Scott, Robert Herrick, London 1974; G. Braden, ‘Robert Herrick and Classical Lyric Poetry’, in The Classics and English Renaissance Poetry: Three Case Studies, New Haven, CT 1978, 154–254; ‘Trust to Good Verses’: Herrick Tercentenary Essays, ed. R. B. Rollin and J. M. Patrick, Pittsburgh, PA 1978; F. Ferrari, L’influenza classica nell’Inghilterra del Seicento e la poesia di Robert Herrick, Messina-Firenze 1979; E. H. Hageman, Robert Herrick: A Reference Guide, Boston, MA 1983; A. B. Coiro, Robert Herrick’s ‘Hesperides’ and the Epigram Book Tradition, Baltimore, MD 1988; ‘Lords of Wine and Oyle’: Community and Conviviality in the Poetry of Robert Herrick, ed. R. Connolly and T. Cain, Oxford 2011. 1

His unsuitedness to a life of action was confirmed in 1627 when, as chaplain, he accompanied an English army on an unsuccessful expedition to the island of Rhé to liberate French Protestants.

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Prospero in his inland island.2 In 1647, however, he was suspended from office by Cromwell for refusing to accept the Puritan ecclesiastical laws. He thus paid in person for his beliefs. After the Restoration he was reinstated in his parish. He never married, and died at the then old age of eightythree, having been spared the more serious consequences of a dissolute life style that had proved fatal to other Cavalier poets. Herrick himself sorted and arranged his works for print. They appeared when he was nearly sixty, at a time when the poems of his fellow writers were being circulated in manuscript, published, at their death, by friends or acquaintances and given the simple title of Poems. Herrick, instead, gave his book one of the first humorously allusive titles in English literature – Hesperides. Published in 1648, it contained all the poetry that Herrick wished to hand down to posterity, thus establishing well in advance the canon on which the future would judge him. He published nothing more. Before him, only Jonson had given proof of such literary maturity. The idea of deliberate confusion is contradicted by the methodical, scrupulous arrangement of the contents, which follows a bipartite if not rising order, so that a first part containing secular verse is followed by Noble Numbers.3 The general prologue in verse, or protasis which parodies the opening of the Aeneid, reviews the range of subjects of the individual poems, thus making Herrick’s book an organized poem, with a beginning and an end, instead of a hotchpotch of separate compositions. It becomes a parable of life, death and eternity; or rather, a comedy. ‘I write of Hell’ (though if anything, he writes of Purgatory); ‘I sing (and ever shall) / Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all’. 2. Herrick stands out among his fellow poets as being essentially healthy, concrete, lucid, self-mocking, and detached. In line with current literary fashion, he uses one or more female personae with namesakes never used before (fourteen in all) to court, exhort, pamper and idolatrize, in a context of extreme artificiality (quite natural for the time), which is 2

3

Local anecdotes referred that Herrick kept a pet pig that he had taught to drink from a tankard. Parish routine was far more prosaic, and it is said that at times Herrick, annoyed that his congregation was not paying due attention, would throw his prayer book at them. Formally this shorter section is marked with the date 1647.

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both anti- and post-Petrarchan as well as parodistically authentic. He is never bewitched, bothered or tormented by a woman, and the kind of love he writes about throughout his works has nothing in common with the spasmodic, violent passion of Donne. Quite apart from when the individual poems were written,4 Herrick dons the mask, not of a blushing young lover, but of an old man affected by paedophile satyriasis (in actual fact, he was in his forties when he became vicar of Dean Prior), stimulated by the pretty peasant girls by whom he was surrounded. To be more precise, he is a fetishist, with a weakness for certain parts of the female body, behaviour or dress – from scarves to petticoats, from breasts and nipples to long, flowing hair. In ‘The Vision’  he is a priapic voyeur like Joyce’s Bloom, dreaming of ‘a virgin […] Spartanness’ with naked legs, of whom he sees ‘the happy dawning of her thigh / which when I saw, I made access / To kiss that tempting nakedness’. He is foiled in this by a branch of myrtle. Not many other poets had the opportunity to get to know at first hand those peasant girls that had been the subject of their poems since the Elizabethans. They are portraits from a long period of research in the field. Herrick was, in effect, an ethnologist, an anthropologist and a student of local customs and folklore, fascinated by the pagan residues in England, which he would never have discovered had he not ended up in that out-of-the-way corner of deepest Devon. Taine was the first to observe that Herrick is not interested in the classically beautiful so much as in the pretty – a foreshadowing of the innocuous and familiar, Biedermeier Romanticism. He does not explore beauty to reach its essence, but lingers on the surface. His poetry is a series of impressions in the pictorial sense of the word, and reality strikes the eye with bright, glittering colours and with its synaesthesias. The reader is not rocked and raked by empathetic involvement with the poem; all he feels is a slight itch.5 Herrick is at home with the miniature rather than the large canvas or the frescoed vault. Long, structured poems are few; the vast majority are 4 5

Conjectural (Press 1961, 18, and Coiro 1988, 12 and 220 n. 21). Premonitions of even a Swift-like abstention from ecstatic rapture, or of its immediate deflation, may be exemplified by the following couplet (H-350): ‘Fain would I kiss my Julia’s dainty leg / Which is as white and hair-less as an egg’.

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fragmented and short, on average not more than ten lines. We are faced with a mosaic of 1402 pieces which can only be compared, in modern poetry, with the work of Emily Dickinson. Or we might think of the later pioneer aesthetics of minimalism or of the sonatinas of Domenico Scarlatti, composed more or less at the same time, and whose number is roughly one third of Herrick’s poems. In such a limited space every word, every punctuation mark, even, becomes highly functional, and, as is often said, Herrick seeks and achieves the inevitable. At times he reduces the lines to disyllabic verses, a far cry from the old fourteen syllables of the poulterer’s measure. 3. Though minimalism, dislike of complexity and admiration of spontaneity are characteristic of the period we live in, Herrick is still largely unknown or, if known, not much liked. Hesperides received little attention throughout the seventeenth century, attracting no list of admirers and stirring up no controversy either. It was reprinted only in 1823, and later welcomed with enthusiasm by Swinburne (who pronounced Herrick to be the purest lyric poet in English)6 and by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Such admiration, however, was not echoed in textbooks, which spared only a few lines for the poet; and the critical bibliography on Herrick is far from overflowing. Everyone agreed that Herrick’s poetry lacked profundity and was not sufficiently complex, a discriminating criterion taken up later by structuralists. He was attacked because he was deficient in intellectual vigour and logical vis; in his hundreds of poems he did nothing but repeat the same old message that everything in the world fades away and so it is best to enjoy oneself while one can. Sometimes querulous and earnest, reserved and sober, he is seen as a little too languid and genteel. And that simple refrain Herrick drew, without novelties, from the Latin classics, from Horace, Catullus, above all Martial, and from the epigrams of the Greek Anthology.7 Critics have been hostile to him simply on the basis of the aesthetic criterion of his limited thematic range. His admirers 6 7

Press 1961, 5. See, on Herrick’s position in the epigrammatic tradition, the overly initiatic and philologically oriented debate between Coiro 1988 (119, 129, 166) and passim, and Braden 1978.

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respond that, instead, he reformulates well-known axioms in lilts and prosodic forms that delight and captivate, and on an assortment of occasions, moods and states of mind that look forward to later sensibilities. Critical reception started to veer when Herrick’s poetry ceased to be considered simple, easy and straightforward, but possibly complex and much less superficial that it had appeared, thus inverting the initial thesis with a petition of principle. The very fact that Hesperides was published just before the execution of Charles I is no sign of evasion or escapism. In fact, the hortus conclusus that Herrick celebrates is a criticism of growing Puritan severity, and its poetry a form of support for rural festivities at a time when the regime was tightening its hold on the country. Herrick invites the reader to share the pleasure of country activities and the give and take of a still perfectly functional microcosm; to share the roots and residues of pagan or medieval rites, such as the Maypole. The insistence on the transience of all earthly things in a way betrays, masks, and one might say exorcises the Puritan threat hanging over the Caroline belle époque. We even hear distant echoes of the heartfelt pleas of Hopkins, expressed with similar verbal devices. Hopkins too foresaw with dread a coming end, and like Herrick looked back to an unsullied primeval creation. Herrick’s acceptance of a life beyond our earthly existence is stripped of all exceptionality, presented as it is, as sometimes in Hopkins, in disarming dream visions of a childlike, naïve quality. 4. Herrick’s poems have for many years taken pride of place in anthologies thanks to their easy, flowing verse, their musicality and accessibility. We must beware, however, of a partial and fragmentary reading of his work. Each individual reader of Hesperides will choose his handful of favourite poems, his main problem being Herrick’s abundance – so unlike the slender volumes of other Cavalier poets – or the variety of forms and genres (epithalamia, epistles, epitaphs, panegyrics, epigrams, occasional poems, short satirical pieces, bare couplets, jottings, notes, parables, stories, imaginary anecdotes, aphorisms, songs). If we wished to exclude the crowded gallery of events and happenings that present and ‘photograph’ his female hypostases, we would find ourselves faced with Herrick’s wellknown ‘limited range’. He is not a natural or a nature poet, but some poems on features and phenomena of the landscape – obviously with the usual

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message appended, that everything must die – are triumphs of wit in verse, like the delightful ‘Funeral of the Rose’ (H-687), slighted by Leavis in one of his many instances of aesthetic blindness and idiosyncrasy. In Herrick, the Petrarchan is shot through with anti-Petrarchan effects. In every poem, the words are counted, listed, given their place; the vocabulary is the most common, ordinary, most worn out possible, and yet it works, thanks to the relocation and summation of these tired locutions. There are exceptions: unusual words, apparently out of context, or stretched almost beyond recognition to yield new meanings. For example, ‘protestant’ in the sense of ‘suitor’, a trisyllabic word in a stanza of, mainly as always, monosyllables, and surrounded by terms in themselves quite common in the rhetoric of eroticism. Examples of polysyllabic Latinisms are: ‘repullulation’, ‘liquefaction’, ‘principality’ and the coinage ‘circummortal’ (H-231). Herrick’s love poetry succeeds because of the strange, naïve, unusual argumentation, the seductive sweetness of its music, and, not least, the contrast between ordinary, run-of-the-mill language and a loftier style. The religious verse of Noble Numbers has always been less popular than the love poems, and is often completely ignored because it does not fit in with the heart-rending conflicts usually associated with the genre. In Herrick there is no diabolical or satanic denial of the desire to accept death; the journey to the afterlife is undertaken with serene acceptance. Herrick’s ‘Litany’ is down-to-earth, as always, and predicts death with expressions that are indiscreet, not to say disrespectful and satirical. The entire chorus of beautiful country nymphs is summoned to his deathbed by the dying poet and entrusted with the meticulous execution of his funeral service. Herrick’s theodicy is mixed with a satisfied irenic spirit in blatant contrast to the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. Heaven is within reach and there will be a huge outburst of light that will disperse the shades of darkness. Of course, God will wield his rod but the blows will be painless and will soon cease. Forever naïve, Herrick does not speak as a priest, from the pulpit or ex cathedra, but using understatements or the banalizations of the eavesdropper or someone who has just dropped in (‘As learn’d Aquinas saith’, or Boethius, or Cassiodorus). This calm, clear, confident meeting with the life to come recalls, once again, the floral Hopkins of ‘Heaven-Haven’, before his religious poetry turned ‘terrible’.

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§ 12. Herbert* I: The quintessence of Anglican spirituality As in the past, critical opinion today is far from unanimous concerning George Herbert (1593–1633), the second greatest religious poet in the seventeenth century, a period that includes not only Donne, but Crashaw *

The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson, Oxford 1941, The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. H. Gardner, Oxford 1961, and The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. C. A. Patrides, London 1974, have now been superseded by The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. H. Wilcox, Cambridge 2007. Concordance of the complete works, ed. M. A. Di Cesare and R. Mignani, Ithaca, NY and London 1977. The first biography was by Izaak Walton, The Life of Mr George Herbert, in 1670. A. Tate, A Reading of George Herbert, Chicago, IL 1952; R. Tuve, A Reading of George Herbert, London and Chicago, IL 1952; M. Bottrall, George Herbert, London 1954; L. L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century, New Haven, CT and London 1954, 249–320; J. H. Summers, George Herbert: His Religion and Art, London 1954; M. Chute, Two Gentle Men: The Lives of G. Herbert and R. Herrick, London 1960; T. S. Eliot, George Herbert, London 1962; M. A. Rickey, Utmost Art: Complexity in the Verse of George Herbert, Lexington, KY 1966; V. Poggi, George Herbert, Bologna 1967; A. Stein, George Herbert’s Lyrics, Baltimore, MD 1968; H. Vendler, The Poetry of George Herbert, Cambridge, MA 1975; A. M. Charles, A Life of George Herbert, New York 1977; S. Fish, The Living Temple: George Herbert and Catechizing, Berkeley, CA 1978; ‘Too Rich to Clothe the Sunne’: Essays on George Herbert, ed. C. J. Summers and T.-L. Pebworth, Pittsburgh, PA 1980; B. L. Harman, Costly Monuments: Representations of the Self in George Herbert’s Poetry, Cambridge, MA 1982; CRHE, ed. C. A. Patrides, London 1983; R. Strier, Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry, Chicago, IL 1983; D. Benet, Secretary of Praise: The Poetic Vocation of George Herbert, Columbia, MO 1984; C. Bloch, Spelling the Word: George Herbert and the Bible, Berkeley, CA 1985; G. E. Veith, Jr, Reformation Spirituality: The Religion of George Herbert, Lewisburg, PA 1985; George Herbert and Henry Vaughan, ed. L. L. Martz, Oxford 1986; S. Stewart, George Herbert, Boston, MA 1986; M. White Singleton, God’s Courtier: Configuring a Different Grace in George Herbert’s ‘Temple’, Cambridge 1987; T. G. Sherwood, Herbert’s Prayerful Art, Toronto 1989; M. C. Schoenfeldt, Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship, Chicago, IL 1991; H. Toliver, George Herbert’s Christian Narrative, University Park, PA 1993; E. Clarke, Theory and Theology in George Herbert’s Poetry: ‘Divinitie, and Poesie, Met’, Oxford 1997;  C. Malcolmson, Heart-Work: George Herbert and the Protestant Ethic, Stanford, CA 1999, and George Herbert: A Literary Life, Basingstoke 2002; J. Falloon, Heart in Pilgrimage: A Life of George Herbert, Milton Keynes 2006; C. Sullivan, The Rhetoric of the Conscience in Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan, Oxford 2008; J. Drury, Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert, London 2013.

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(judged by some to be, at his best, superior to Herbert),1 besides Vaughan and Traherne, and excluding Milton – though, strictly speaking, Milton is more a poet of theological epic than a devotional poet. Those sneaking objections once raised against Donne have been reoriented, with an added aggravation, against Herbert, targeting his ‘quaintness’ – a term first used by Coleridge and since become ubiquitous – that is, the strangeness, or, in a more derogative sense, the odd, sometimes kitsch2 nature of his imagery.3 It is symptomatic that Herbert was rediscovered and reassessed more systematically about 100 years ago, at the same time as another religious poet – so similar in many respects to Herbert that the parallelism between them is now accepted by all – Hopkins, initially subjected to ostracism dictated by the same aesthetic taste, or prejudice, and from 1918 and for the next few decades criticized and misunderstood on the basis of almost identical infringements of presumed norms of literary decorum. In this discussion I shall only hint at the dialogue at a distance between the two poets on the level of conceptual, theological and even terminological parallels that offer ample proof of the number of doubles – not all of whom coinciding with each other – that the Victorian poet would elect. Apart from the Romantic interlude (not indifferent to Herbert, but with exceptions),4 from the late seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth, with the parenthesis of some, though not all, of the avant-garde movements, Herbert criticism was overshadowed by an Enlightenment fear of similar violations of aesthetic norms. When he criticized Herbert’s ‘tricks’ Addison was using the same criteria as Bridges who castigated Hopkins’s ‘faults of taste’.5 Herbert was 1 2 3

4 5

Cf. Eliot 1962, 16. The best example is that of Christ’s winding sheets which become handkerchiefs for the faithful. Praz (in PSL, 254), composing his ‘epigraph’ on Herbert, repeated verbatim in other writings, is one of the few who row against the stream; he finds Herbert’s metaphors ‘in the long run monotonous and lacking surprise’ (while received opinion finds them full of surprises), also blaming them for their coldness. It must be admitted that it is not at all easy to grasp the compelling logic behind this statement. One wonders which poet William Cowper had in mind when he judged Herbert to be ‘gothic and uncouth’ (CRHE, 164). Nine editions had appeared before Walton’s hagiographic biography. Coleridge makes several mentions of him in Biographia Literaria; interest in him was revived

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accused of showing off; it was said that behind all the stylistic acrobatics there was very little substance, and that all his insistence on the poetic signifier is scarcely offset by his earnestness. So Herbert aroused curiosity but not praise, without being an actual fiasco. Like Lovelace, he was called the specialist in bathos. Now, the main difference between him and his brother, Lord Herbert of Cherbury,6 is first of all that George Herbert starts from the concrete image while Herbert of Cherbury is purely dianoetic; the older brother seems to have been right when he pointed out in George the family traits in his temperament: outbursts of anger, pride, and above all, boastfulness and ambition. 2. Herbert, like Hopkins, was the rising star of his Cambridge college; both were sickly, both formidable classicists, capable of writing poetry in Greek and Latin; one was Welsh by birth, the other ‘by vocation’; both were university dons, musicians and linguists. It is significant that both composed their carefully wrought poems with misgivings, suspecting they were not so much prayers or homilies as displays of sinful narcissistic indulgence; and that both, almost on their deathbed, entrusted them to a friend to decide whether or not to publish them (Ferrar7 for Herbert and Bridges for Hopkins). Herbert also carried out a ‘slaughter of the innocents’,8 burning or otherwise getting rid of his worldly poetry before taking holy orders; his posthumous book is similar in size to that of Hopkins and contains poetic exercises in Latin and Greek; altogether, it describes a fierce struggle between the poet and God, as in the case of Hopkins, ending in reconciliation (Herbert openly said as much to Ferrar). In both, the arrival in a

6 7

8

by various religious poets and writers such as Ruskin, Christina Rossetti and Hopkins himself. § 15. Nicholas Ferrar (1592–1639), born in London from a wealthy family, returned from his journeys on the Continent with his Anglican faith intact; he entered the Church as a deacon, and, on the death of his father, in 1630, founded a religious community near Little Gidding, to the north-west of Cambridge (the first monastery after the dissolution by Henry VIII, it was destroyed by the Puritans in 1647). It was probably the thought of Ferrar’s Little Gidding that induced T. S. Eliot to write his short study of Herbert in 1962, for the reasons indicated in Volume 7, § 100.6. Volume 6, § 192.4.

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safe haven is accompanied by small but nonetheless disturbing waves that threaten to pitch the repentant sinner back into the deep.9 Recent criticism has underlined supposed existentialist premonitions, accentuating the tones of anguish and the torment of misbelief, starting from the pioneering suggestion found in Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity.10 The only obvious difference is that Herbert’s poems appeared only a few months after his death, while those of Hopkins had to wait many years. Early twentieth-century critics commenting on Herbert and his imagery posited analogies with, for example, Lewis Carroll (Hopkins was as yet unknown, and Dylan Thomas still to come), Keble,11 Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson,12 even T. S. Eliot and Auden, Elizabeth Bishop and Anthony Hecht. The vast critical bibliography, of which only a small selection is given in my Bibliography, far exceeds the importance generally attributed to him as a poet. Scarcely a year goes by without the publication of one or more books on him, and the innumerable papers to be found in the various learned journals are a clear sign that Herbert has become a cult figure. 3. A third and still more famous book of poems appeared in 1633, the same year as Herbert’s: that of John Donne. This is like an optical illusion, of course, in that Donne was old enough to be Herbert’s father. The two were brought into contact by Herbert’s mother, Magdalen Newport; 9 10

11 12

Hence Aldous Huxley’s description of Herbert as the poet ‘of variable English weather’. Cf. the reading of ‘The Sacrifice’ (the second, and longest, poem in The Temple) in W. Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, London 1984 (1st edn 1930), 226–33, and Tuve’s point-by-point rebuttal (1952). ‘The Sacrifice’ is the dramatization of Christ’s ascent of Golgotha in the form of a dramatic monologue in rhymed tercets, each followed by a refrain. Empson interpreted the fifty-first verse, dealing with the Fall and the restitution of the apple by Jesus, as a metaphor for incest. Tuve sees no contradictory impulses or Freudian complexes in the poem, just traditional liturgical and iconographic models and representations of Easter. Empson replied with an extended version of his interpretation, published in TLS (31 December 1993, 11–12), in which, after much lengthy and contorted decoration, he confirmed the presence, for him at any rate quite clear, of ‘double meanings somewhere in the poet’s mind’, that is, ‘without his realizing them and totally unintentional’. MVO, 196–200. Praz associates Herbert with Dickinson in CLA, vol. II, 150, as do other critics quoted in CRHE, 47–8 n. 103.

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she was left a widow when George was three and moved to Oxford to give her ten children a better education. She fell under Donne’s magnetic spell, and was immortalized in one of his ‘anniversaries’. Herbert addresses Donne in several sonnets written at the age of seventeen to bid farewell to love poetry and embrace exclusively religious themes. Herbert’s inclusion in the Metaphysical school of Donne has been exhaustively debated by critics without any agreement being reached. The difference between the two is one of poetic intensity: Donne is spasmodic, Herbert more graceful, almost feminine in the way he embroiders his tales of fancy. Herbert makes poetic use of philosophy and the new science but without Donne’s obsessiveness; and, of course, Herbert wrote no love poetry. T. S. Eliot expressed their diversity with a formula: Herbert represents the dominion of feeling over intellect, Donne the opposite.13 Herbert differs from Donne in the pictorial or iconic nature of his writing, or ‘visual hieroglyphic’, as seen in the shape of the verse in ‘The Altar’ or in ‘Easter Wings’.14 In a handful of Herbert’s poems, the theological content is reduced to a play on words, like an anagram or an acrostic. Similar stratagems or stylistic devices are auditory as well as visual: Herbert exploits onomatopoeia and the echo effect, and internal conflict is conveyed in the dissonance of the verse, which gives way to harmony when inner peace is restored. Setting these poems to music came natural to a poet who was himself a talented musician.15 The debate which raged in the golden age of Herbert’s ‘redis-

13 14

15

Eliot 1962, 17. ‘Easter Wings’ can be read vertically or horizontally, the latter being the case in some editions (where, for example, the page is too narrow to allow a vertical reading): wings beating, or the shape of a funnel, or bellows, to suggest an upward movement. For greater effect, a different system of reading would be necessary, from the bottom up. Like many of Herbert’s poems, this one dazzlingly recapitulates the story of the Creation, the Fall (the lowest point), the Incarnation and the Resurrection (the highest point). ‘Jordan II’ casts doubt on the idea of Herbert as a ‘Metaphysical’ poet: the temptation of the ornate is like a flame that winds and rises, but winds in vain because it is ‘vanitie’ – the word is whispered in the poet’s ear by someone, a friend, his other self, his conscience, God. The admonishment of this friend takes us back to the concept of the poet, not as an original inventor, but as a medieval copyist. As Hopkins will

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covery’, the 1950s and 60s, has however extended its range of interest from his imagery to include the question of his beliefs. Was there, in Herbert, a basic Calvinist element even before Puritanism became ‘official’? Or was he, instead, a Catholic at heart, influenced by St Francis de Sales and owing much to Ignatian meditation? L. L. Martz, in the classic historical reconstruction I have already quoted, in which he explores the background of religious Metaphysical poetry, saw in Herbert a specifically ‘Salesian’ spirituality which showed, if nothing else, that Herbert was a great mixer, capable of combining very different influences in a final product that is unmistakably his own. Lewalski disagreed, saying that Herbert reflects the Protestant-Pauline paradigm of ‘justification’, with salvation lying entirely in the hands of God while Man is powerless.16 Herbert’s only intervention in the theological controversies of the day was a Latin thesis against the Scottish Puritan Andrew Melville. It is equally certain that in 1632 Herbert not only read the spiritual handbook by Spanish Giovanni Valdesso, given to him by Ferrar, but that he also translated it, pronouncing the author ‘a true servant of God’.17 In the end, it is difficult not to feel that impec-

16

17

say in ‘Hurrahing in Harvest’, the things were already there, only the ‘beholder’ was ‘wanting’. Cf. § 2.4 for the differing opinions of the two scholars. Judging from ‘Love III’, man believes himself to be really ‘guilty’ and unworthy to take part in the Eucharistic feast or eternal life; but he receives repeated, loving invitations from the Lord, who has taken upon himself all man’s sins, and at last sits down at the banquet. Herbert often exhibits fears and senses of guilt that have no grounding in reality. The debate on Herbert’s Calvinism or Anglo-Catholicism is ongoing, enriched by contributions which are becoming more and more technical and specialized. See in this regard, for example, Fish 1978, Sherwood 1989, and Malcolmson 1999. A poet who was praised by the Puritan, Baxter, paraphrased by the Methodist, Wesley (CRHE, 11, 16–18), and imitated by the Catholic, Hopkins, is clearly ecumenical and non-confessional. In ‘The British Church’, probably a very early work, Herbert enters the fray as an Anglican. Echoing Donne’s ‘The Anatomy of the World’, the Anglican Church represents a balance between two extremes: the Church of Rome is a scantily dressed woman with a painted face while the ‘Protestant’ Church is too bashful and quite naked. The ideas present in this composition are repeated in ‘The Church Militant’, which completes The Temple, in long sections ending in a refrain. The development of the Church has been towards the west: Egypt, Greece

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cable, methodical Herbert is a facsimile of an Anglican priest at the time of Elizabeth, the closest comparison being with Sidney or Hooker under the banner of the ‘via media’. § 13. Herbert II: ‘The Temple’. The builder of temples The collection of poems entitled The Temple, sent by the dying Herbert to his friend Ferrar, was published posthumously in 1633. It consists of more than 150 poems,18 a good third of which, usually no more than three or four stanzas of mixed metre verse, are compositions of extreme semantic compression produced by the combined action of allusion, reticence, and ellipsis. They are examples of a poetics of false simplicity, in which the richer the network of implication, the more ordinary and literal it appears. Many attempts have been made, some of them well-argued and illuminating, to establish a chronological order different from the original one; but Herbert’s time is mental and symbolic, not calendar-based, and few chronological indicators can be considered certain. However, it is likely that quite a few of the poems were written in the last three years of his life, when he was rector of the little parish (in fact a branch) of Bemerton in Wiltshire, near Salisbury. He arrived here in 1630 after his studies first at Westminster school in London, then at Cambridge from the age of

18

(where philosophy gives way to religion), Rome, then Germany, from where, as is to be expected, the sceptre of religion passes to England. Sin, too, progresses from east to west: idolatry in Egypt, the oracles of Greece, Rome where sin is crowned. Unable to overthrow the Church, Sin becomes a Jesuitical prelate or a Pope. Rome assimilates all the Egyptian vices and the worst of the pagan world. Old and new Rome are joined in a new empire, which for a Protestant is, of course, the empire of the Antichrist. The future is seen in the voyage of religion to America, since the Thames has been ‘polluted’ by the waters of the Seine and the Tiber. The Americans, instead, choose poverty and stay far from the curse of gold. Not included in The Temple are a few poems in the so-called Williams manuscript (which includes preliminary versions of sixty-nine poems of The Temple). Some were transcribed by Walton in his biography; for others the authorship is uncertain. Of particular interest are one in which God is beyond reach and one dedicated to Trinity Sunday, the subject of another poem remarkable for linguistic artifices. ‘Evensong’ compares the sun with man, setting every day. Several of the Latin poems are celebratory or polemical with regard to Catholicism.

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seventeen. At Cambridge he taught rhetoric from 1618 and from 1620 to 1627 held the office of ‘public orator’, an official of the university whose job it was to welcome visiting authorities. Elected twice as a member of Parliament, his ambitions for a place at court were shattered by the death of James and of his patrons. After some hesitation he took Holy Orders and became rector first in Lincoln and then at Bemerton,19 where he died of consumption at the age of forty. Almost every single poem in this collection is a microcosm; but just as we can, and should, read Donne’s Songs and Sonnets in the light of an organizing principle, so we should do with Herbert, as T. S. Eliot earnestly enjoined. We find in The Temple a modular organism for the cyclical recurrence of symbolic archetypes, themes, titles, and metrical forms. Three internal organizing modules overlap and interweave in the collection: the first is architectural; the second is the liturgical calendar; the third is the ‘typological’ shuttle offered by the Bible. The entire cosmos is, for Herbert, a divine temple. The choice of the word ‘temple’20 is significant: it is found in the only two works in prose and verse left by Herbert, where it is used in preference to ‘church’, which carries, whether with a capital letter or not, age-old institutional associations that are absent from ‘temple’, a synonym for sacrality, spirituality and transcendental meditation. In his biography of Herbert, Walton pays great attention to Herbert’s idée fixe and tells the reader about his subject’s ambitions, his achievements as an architect, planner, and above all unpaid restorer of churches and chapels, and therefore ‘divine mason’. The temple already existed, but it was falling down literally and symbolically – a paradigm of his personal faith as well as faith in general at that time, which seemed to be involved in a kind of precocious twilight of the west. Herbert had rebuilt the dilapidated church at Lincoln, paying for the reconstruction and working physically too, although his mother pleaded with him not to over-exert himself. The little church of Bemerton, too, was in ruins and he repaired it. In The Temple, then, building metaphors are numerous, to say 19

His wife never appears in the poems; Herbert nurtured the image of an ideal woman as a companion for an equally ideal country vicar. The Herberts had no children. 20 Some attribute the choice to Ferrar or to the editor Barnabas Oley, in either case in compliance with indications from the author himself.

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the least, as are allegories that use as their vehicles houses and other kinds of buildings. In ‘The World’, one of the many poems constructed on this equation, the world is a stately house brought to ruin by demonic or evil forces (amongst them Fortune, Pleasure and Sin), but completely restored by divine grace; this may be read as an extreme synthesis of the story of the Creation, Fall and Redemption of mankind. In the third stanza, Sin appears in the form of a shady, beckoning sycamore, described as ‘winding slyly’, suggesting the tree under which Adam and Eve took shelter. The symbolic advance into the temple proceeds in ‘The Altar’, ‘The Church-floor’, ‘The Windows’, ‘Church-music’ and ‘Church-monuments’. 2. The vestibule is formed by the seventy-seven stanzas of ‘The ChurchPorch’, the same number, it has been pointed out,21 as the words of the Credo in the vernaculars. It symbolizes an act of purification, like the dipping of fingers in holy water before proceeding up the aisle. In ‘Superliminare’, a second vestibule opens for a believer who may now advance towards the altar. Spatially, The Temple is a place it is now possible to enter; permission has been given with the removal of all profane thoughts. Movement from the door to the altar is millimetric and mimes both the liturgical calendar and eschatological and apocalyptic time. One would expect, therefore, the collection to begin with the Nativity; instead, Herbert starts from the Creation, which is closely followed by the Crucifixion and the Resurrection.22 In reality the criterion of succession and the sequence of the poems become confused and vague, with the insertion of poems in the form of musical variations and according to the poet’s free inspiration.23 Herbert’s art is principally that of the witty title:24 neutral or thematic titles, allusive or suggestive ones, often ambiguous, like ‘The Collar’ or ‘The Pulley’, in which latter that particular mechanical device is not in fact mentioned. The fact that some titles are used more than once is far from being a sign of failing imagination; quite the contrary: it indicates the cyclical repetition of themes 21 22 23

Martz 1954, 291 and n. 6. Bottrall 1954, 90. Bottrall 1954, 57, suggests that the book was left open at the author’s death, and that every cycle is to some extent left unfinished. 24 Often noted and discussed, for example in Rickey 1966, 92–102.

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and new ways to meditate on the same subject. Herbert often takes some everyday occurrence and lifts it to a moral plane, creating an allegorical parallel or contrast involving his typical, graceful fantasy and lively curiosity. He often invents visionary dialogues in which the believer first denies or doubts God’s gifts, only to accept them in the end. Tone and registers alternate, and two frequently used modes are the prayer, begging God not to be angry, and the apostrophe, or, more liturgically, the antiphon. ‘Prayer I’ is a brilliant illustration of the logical-argumentative category of poetry as ‘definition’ and, at the same time, a volley of metaphors, some of them quite ordinary, others shocking. As I have already said, Herbert sometimes loves to play with words, and reduces, or raises, aspects of the spiritual life to a level of transcendental paradox, as in ‘Sinnes Round’, where the three stanzas end with the same line as begins the following one, and the poem ends with a repetition of the opening words; the semantic circularity reflects the circuitous action of sin (sins go in a circle, starting with thoughts, proceeding to words, from words to evil intentions, and thence to the hands, that is to say, actions, which in turn generate sinful thoughts; and so the ‘round’ begins again); or in ‘Paradise’,25 or in ‘The Water-course’.26 3. Each step forward is matched by one step backwards, but there is a final, decisive step that brings the supplicant to the heavenly feast, but only by the grace of God. Hence the shifts of mood in the highly dramatic

25

Content is fused with form whenever it reproduces the concept of a divine faith as a shelter for man, protecting him against invasion and danger; this explains the almost riddle-like device of the dropping of letters in the rhymes of the four threeline verses: ‘grow-row-ow’ and so on, with the inclusion of one word inside another. 26 The two stanzas of this poem end with a bracket containing two alternative words and where the meaning is completed according to which of the two contrasting words is chosen. In the first: the world is full of suffering, but this is not surprising since suffering awaits him who ‘loves life’ or ‘strife’. In the second: the sinner is told to ask Nature for all the liquid she possesses to turn into tears of joy or remorse. In ‘Coloss. 3. 3’ – which argues that life has two motions like the sun, one straight and visible, the other hidden and inclined towards God – the words in italics present in every line, when read one after the other, contain the following message: ‘My life is his in Him that is my treasure’. Other poems contain a numerological mimesis, as in ‘Trinity Sunday’ in three triplets.

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interior monologue of ‘The Collar’ or ‘Temper I’, where the speaker is conscious of his shortcomings and weaknesses. The world is always a source of danger and temptation, and its fruits offer themselves for man’s picking and enjoyment: man gathers his strength and abstains in the name of God. Herbert’s God looks after his creature and does not abandon him, and the poet believes he has discovered the divine plan. God has his own creative logic, together with tactics and strategies. He keeps him on edge, making him pull at the leash, so that he doesn’t wallow in the enjoyment of natural beauty. The plan of salvation, the purpose and aim of human suffering, emerge: it serves to bring man closer to God. Herbert’s theology is quite anti-Calvinist seen in this light: divine grace is necessary but not sufficient without man’s collaboration; each has a part to play and man’s spontaneous agreement is always an essential part of the equation (‘The Windows’). Hence the concept and the word ‘combination’ or grafting: wings fly high if they are grafted onto the divine in ‘Easter-Wings’; doctrine must be combined with real life. Now, God is, besides other things, a strategist: he gives free rein to man but when he intervenes, the effect is instantaneous, and the situation is overturned, as in ‘A Parody’, where the word is used in a musical, rather than literal, sense. And yet Herbert at bottom is writing a parody when he portrays himself forever falling, a prey to temptations that appear in the allegorical guise of the various Vices, not those of Langland but a parody of them; it is as if the poet were whispering to the reader that he is ‘being allegorical’, that is, parodic. § 14. Herbert III: ‘A Priest to the Temple’. A vicar’s prayer book Herbert considerably increased his production in the last three years of his life: besides working incessantly on the poems of The Temple, he completed, in 1632, the admittedly short A Priest to the Temple27 (in thirty-seven chapters plus a prayer and a sermon). He was, however, never frenetic. In one sense, the book is a confession, in another a prescription, a reminder by the poet to himself. It is, therefore, a practical handbook, an account of past or present experiences, and of ideals to be pursued. The reader will

27

Published only in 1652.

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find no blinding light of transcendence here; the first page conveys the well-known traits of solidity, order and precision, with an immediate distinction between three kinds of clergyman, and his decision to deal only with the country variety. In the course of his treatise, Herbert identifies, separates, documents, examines and classifies activities, offices, gifts and particular aspects of a minister’s duties. Rather than exalted, he is downto-earth, listing and analysing the tactics, techniques, instruments and even stratagems of the office, like the most effective way of preaching, for example, which may be to stir up emotion, quite unlike catechism, which is based on questions and answers. He unwittingly reveals a persuasive technique, a theory, if not of communication, of the strategy of the preacher. His meticulous analysis of the Christian life may seem excessive, with his obsession with finding two or more alternatives, or possibilities or case histories. In this it is almost like Spinoza. On the other hand, almost every affirmation is measured and founded on numerous Biblical sources, so that one thinks of the erudite, almost pedantic, prose of Burton’s Anatomy (in particular when he deals with the vicar’s diet, the healthy foods that aid and the unhealthy ones that block digestion).28 No mention is made of fears or failings, or the sudden crises of conscience of which we read in the poems; all gives way to the need to put on a display of integrity, blamelessness, and absolute control of one’s impulses and weaknesses. However, chapter twenty-seven does state that a curate is, or ought to be, always sad because of the Cross, but that in order to reach out to his parishioners, he should temper his sadness with the occasional outburst of joy. Among his various tasks, the vicar mediates with the Crown and acts as a public official. Chapter thirteen deals with church maintenance, furniture and adornments, and the functioning of all the components of liturgical actions. Herbert does make the odd slip, as when he says that visits to parishioners are a necessity, even to cottages ‘though [they] smell never so lothsomly’. Herbert’s manual is a link between old and more recent English handbooks of various kinds, the fruit of eccentricity in the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth, and it launches a human archetype

28

Herbert had translated Discorsi della vita sobria by the Italian Luigi Cornaro.

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that will be part of the English way of life right up to the beginning of the twentieth century. Before Herbert, we had the book of the governor and that of the archer with Elyot and Ascham. After him will come the book of the angler. The good country curate, who for Herbert could be married or celibate, will become a staple in English comic and realistic theatre, and in the ‘scenes of clerical life’, from Goldsmith to George Eliot, to Kingsley and up to Orwell. § 15. Herbert of Cherbury George Herbert’s elder brother, Edward Herbert, usually called ‘of Cherbury’ (1583–1648), studied at Oxford, married at the age of fifteen a rich heiress several years his senior, was appointed while still young to various official posts by King James, and spent seven years in Europe as a diplomat and soldier fighting for Prince Maurice of Nassau. From 1619 to 1624 he was ambassador to France, accompanied, as we have seen, by the poet, Carew. Herrick participated with him in the unsuccessful English expedition to the island of Rhé in 1627.1 From 1629 to 1642 he was always by the side of King Charles, who had given him the title of lord, but during the Civil War, in an unexpected gesture of cowardice or common sense, he negotiated a position of neutrality with the parliamentary forces in order to save his castle and avoid the destruction of his library. He died shortly after. An ‘Elizabethan’ gentleman, cosmopolitan and eclectic, objectively versatile, and therefore a man both of action and of thought, he was active in three fields: philosophy, autobiographical prose, and poetry.2 While it is as a philosopher that Herbert is remembered, in my opinion his autobiographical writings constitute his most forward-looking and innovative work, though in actual fact they had no influence on his immediate successors since they were published only in 1764. His poetry, on the other hand, is pretentious, abstruse and unnaturally complicated. Today his autobiography is still the object of prejudice; the time has come to right the

1 2

§ 11.1 n. 1. He wrote a history of Henry VIII as well as pamphlets praising various figures of public life.

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balance: it cannot be denied that Herbert is often ridiculous in his boastful self-confidence and his tendency to lay down the law; critics have had a field day mocking him, calling him a Falstaff, a Bobadil, a Don Quixote reborn, but they have never been able to deny the ease and finesse of the consummate raconteur. The autobiography is modern in that it is based on facts; the style is perfect, elegant without being orotund, sometimes rather solemn but never boring, and with just the right amount of digressions. He recounts his prowess in duels, love affairs and diplomacy with Castiglionesque nonchalance. Can his unadorned chronicle not be seen as an anticipation of Defoe? And the story of the nun from Murano, with the marvellous voice whose singing provokes the following comment in the Venetian dialect: ‘Moria pur quando vuol, non bisogna mutar ni voce ni facia, per esser un angelo’ [‘Let her die when she will, one doesn’t have to change either one’s voice or face to be an angel’]. Does this not look forward to the ‘sentimental’ prose of Sterne’s journey? Herbert’s slender volume ends abruptly, breaks off, we might say, with the news that De veritate was ready for the press, approved by Grotius and Tilenius; but Herbert knew he could go ahead only when he received a kind of divine seal of approval in the form of ‘a peal of thunder, loud but soft’ in the skies. 2. De veritate (1624), written in Latin, is Herbert’s major work and places him among Bacon’s young contemporaries, though with different results. In it Herbert, wishing to clear the ground of idola, states the pragmatic principle that what has always been thought and believed can be accepted as true. At the basis of religion he placed five principles, later deformed and distorted by the ministers of the various confessions. Assigning absolute value to original belief makes him unable to contemplate a ‘development of faith’ as a feature of history and evolution, unlike other contemporary and future schools of thought. The reconciliation of this ‘primitive’ faith with Anglicanism – in other words, of innatism with rationalism – rests on the belief in a supreme being, God, whom it is man’s duty to adore; virtue is necessary for a righteous life; every sinner can repent, and predestination is rejected; but in the life to come, God dispenses rewards and punishments. In this reductive sense Herbert’s five principles are ‘catholic’, that is, valid in all religions. With another work, published posthumously in 1663, De religione gentilium, Herbert acquired

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the reputation as the founder of English deism. His poetry, collected posthumously in Occasional Verse (1665), is, on the other hand, difficult to place: Herbert appeals to Jonson and greets him, but is not of ‘the tribe of Ben’. Cavalier? He is too thoughtful. Is he a poet of conceits and philosophic speculation like Donne? This is certainly nearer the mark, but he is more arid, awkward and circumlocutional, less able to weld feeling, emotion and thought into one inseparable whole. Not a few poems display laboured reasoning or sophistry ill-digested and dressed up in rhyme. The ‘question’ in ‘An Ode Upon A Question Moved’, clearly traced on ‘The Extasie’, might well have been suggested to him by Herrick, who dismissed a Platonic-Christian solution but registered the very problem debated here, that death is the end of everything, including love, or at least physical and sexual love. Herbert’s answer is that it is only physical love that ends with death, while chaste, spiritualized love lives forever. The fame of this poem was enhanced partly by the fact that Tennyson uses Herbert’s quatrain in In Memoriam, adapting it as a metrical signifier for the same or similar meaning, but also because the question is contextualized in a pastoral dialogue between a doubting Celinda and a Melander as know-all stand-in for the poet himself. Ideologically inundated by Platonism, Herbert plays ceaselessly with related concepts, ending up in quite a tangle. Not one, but three poems are entitled ‘Platonic Love’. The normal evolution of poetic creation is reversed, and the poet progresses not from sense data to abstract thought, but vice versa. In only two, particularly effective, poems do we find a starting point that is real and concrete: in one, a clock measuring the inexorable march of time; in the other, a candle that gutters and dies. § 16. Crashaw* I: The English apotheosis of continental Baroque Richard Crashaw (1612 or 1613–1649) and George Herbert are usually mentioned in the same breath, and the parallel between the two is still 1

*

Poems, English, Latin and Greek, ed. L. C. Martin, Oxford 1927, and, revised, 1957; The Complete Poetry of Richard Crashaw, ed. G. W. Williams, Garden City, NY 1970, 1974; The English Poems, ed. R. Rambuss, Minneapolis, MN 2013. M. Praz, Seicentismo e marinismo in Inghilterra, Firenze 1925, Richard Crashaw, Brescia 1946 and Roma 1964, and ‘The Flaming Heart: Richard Crashaw and the Baroque’, in The Flaming

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instructive, or worth rediscussing. They are chronological neighbours and practised the same poetic subgenre; Crashaw acknowledged his debt to Herbert – more openly than Herbert did his to Donne – when he entitled his first work Steps to the Temple as a tribute to his predecessor. However, on closer examination, it becomes clear that Crashaw, the most likeable, most ‘cavalier’ of poets, has in fact little else in common with Herbert. The word ‘temple’, which I have discussed in the section on Herbert, has in Crashaw a different connotation: rather than a place of naked contemplation and silent meditation it echoes with the fanfares of triumph and glitters with gold and silver. While Herbert is introvert, sombre, dry, of few, measured words, Crashaw is extrovert, exuberant, torrential. Herbert is a poet of habit: his poetry expresses the variable in the unvarying; almost all his poems are the same size and make. Crashaw tortures form, making it metamorphic and never solidified; he ranges free, knowing no borders. What emerges is a contrast between Herbert’s poetry, Metaphysical but sui generis, with the

Heart: Essays on Crashaw, Machiavelli, and Other Studies in the Relations between Italian and Renaissance Literature from Chaucer to T. S. Eliot, New York 1958, 204–63; T. S. Eliot, ‘Note on Richard Crashaw’, in For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order, London 1928, 117–25; R. C. Wallerstein, Crashaw: A Study in Style and Poetic Development, Madison, WI 1935 (on Crashaw’s sources, and full of misprints); A. Warren, Richard Crashaw: A Study in Baroque Sensibility, Baton Rouge, LA 1939, London 1957; B. Willey, Richard Crashaw: A Memorial Lecture, Cambridge 1949; M. E. Rickey, Rhyme and Meaning in Richard Crashaw, Lexington, KY 1961, New York 1973; G. W. Williams, Image and Symbol in the Sacred Poetry of Richard Crashaw, Columbia, SC 1963; J. Bennett, ‘Richard Crashaw’, in Five Metaphysical Poets: Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw, Marvell, Cambridge 1964, 90–108; L. L. Martz, ‘Richard Crashaw: Love’s Architecture’, in The Wit of Love: Donne, Carew, Crashaw, Marvell, Notre Dame, IN 1969, 113–47; R. T. Petersson, The Art of Ecstasy: Teresa, Bernini and Crashaw, London and New York 1970; M. F. Bertonasco, Crashaw and the Baroque, Tuscaloosa, AL 1971; Essays on Richard Crashaw, ed. R. M. Cooper, Salzburg 1979, who is also the author of An Essay on the Art of Richard Crashaw, Salzburg 1982; P. A. Parrish, Richard Crashaw, Boston, MA 1980; T. F. Healy, Richard Crashaw, Leiden 1986; New Perspectives on the Life and Art of Richard Crashaw, ed. J. J. Roberts, Columbia, MO 1990; M. Sabine, Feminine Engendered Faith: The Poetry of John Donne and Richard Crashaw, London 1992; V. Roger, Le cœur et la croix: l’esthétique baroque de Richard Crashaw, Paris 2012.

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addition of Baroque elements such as grotesque and far-fetched images, and Crashaw’s, one of the principal examples of continental Baroque, with which he came into direct contact in the variety of its literary, pictorial and architectural forms.1 So, even if he was one of the first poets to be labelled ‘Metaphysical’, he is in fact one of the furthest from the ‘Metaphysical’ sensibility, both because Baroque favours visual mediation and because the source of its imagery is different: the Metaphysicals draw on science and learning, the Baroque on the physical and the sensual aspects of reality. While Herbert commits timid, prudish evasions and infractions, which do not compromise an underlying unity, Crashaw’s representations of reality are exaggerated and undisciplined, and teeter on the edge of insanity. He abolishes anxiety and celebrates only the uncontrasted triumph of faith and the brilliance of his own paradoxes. T. S. Eliot noted the difference, obvious, no doubt, but true for all that, between a ‘devotional’ poet like Herbert and a religious one, like Crashaw, one who extols and persuades, proselytizes, inflames the lukewarm or unbelieving heart.2 His is the voice of exhortation rather than of tortured introspection, the voice of one who keeps to himself his doubts, his hesitations, his moments of rebellion, if any, and with unshakeable faith in the proximity of salvation, attempts to encourage and convert his fellow men. 2. Considering he is a Catholic as well as a Baroque poet, and bearing in mind the prejudiced treatment meted out to Hopkins, the English reception of Crashaw has been exceptionally positive. The high priests of literary criticism, instead of giving thumbs down, have been surprisingly indulgent, open-minded, even enthusiastic. Of course, everyone points out that Crashaw did not write much, given his short, adventurous life, and what he did write is of uneven quality, though a good number of excellent poems tower over the rest. Altogether, English critics have given a good example of fair play in their handling of this poet. Saintsbury observed that things 1

2

T. S. Eliot (1928, 125) eulogizes Praz for preferring Crashaw to Marino and Góngora. Praz is also the acknowledged authority concerning parallels between Crashaw and Jesuit and Latin poetry, and with the painting of Murillo, Rubens and El Greco. Eclectic and versatile, Crashaw excelled in drawing and engraving. Eliot 1928, 124.

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change radically, and one is led to make diametric judgements according to which of two schools one belongs to, the Enlightenment-Classical, or the Romantic. The former ostracizes, the latter sympathizes.3 He followed up with a strangely positive, nostalgic, deeply committed exaltation of the infinite grace of the non-religious ‘The Wishes’, whereas he castigated ‘The Weeper’ and its dubious taste. He becomes ecstatic again, loudly so, even by his own standards, when he comes to the hymn to St Teresa, an explosion of passionate feeling, unmatched by anything to be found ‘in English, perhaps in all poetry’. Eliot in 1928 was just as enthusiastic, and asserted, with some degree of provocation, that it was completely out of the question to compare Crashaw with Keats and Shelley; while Keats is out of the running in the comparison, Shelley, too, surprisingly, loses. Coleridge stated enigmatically that he was thinking of Crashaw when he wrote Christabel, though there is no obvious connection. Crashaw had no immediate heirs and was not read for 150 years after his death, despite Cowley’s elegy; but he re-emerges in the neo-Baroque, Catholic Victorian poets at the end of the nineteenth century, such as Hopkins in the ‘Deutschland’ or Thompson in ‘The Hound of Heaven’. 3. A study of Crashaw’s biography leads us up or down to several recurring idiosyncrasies and symbolisms to be found in his poetry, and enables us to follow his transformation into a Catholic Baroque poet. His life was an asymptotic journey towards Rome in all senses: towards the Marian cult, the veneration for saints, especially female ones, the sacrificial auto da fé of the martyr.4 The search for a spiritual father – and his belief that he might find one in Herbert – could be seen as a reaction against his real father, a Puritan preacher renowned for his anti-Catholicism, were it not for the fact that the father in question was also a translator of Jesuit hymns to the Virgin Mary. Even stronger was Crashaw’s need for a mother’s breast on which to take refuge: his own mother died when he was a baby, her place taken by a loving stepmother half his father’s age. When Crashaw was eight, she too died. It is not surprising, then, if Crashaw grew up in 3 4

SAI, 412–14. On one hand Crashaw wrote an early work against the Gunpowder Plot, on the other he had to apologize for writing the hymn to St Teresa while still an Anglican.

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the shadow of Madonna-like substitutes, and if his poetry is dominated by the figures of Mary Magdalen, representing a fusion, not synchronic (or perhaps it is) of spirituality and physicality, and St Teresa of Ávila.5 He graduated from Cambridge in 1634, and later that same year published a book of sacred epigrams in Latin. In 1635, already a fellow and teacher at Cambridge, he was ordained in the Anglican church, thus showing that he had moved away from his father’s persuasion and now sympathized with the High Church position of Archbishop Laud, becoming a frequent visitor to Ferrar’s community at Little Gidding. It was here, in all likelihood, that the myth of George Herbert took possession of him, which meant that sooner or later he would collide with Puritanism. Having refused to subscribe to the Covenant, Crashaw fled to Holland in 1643, and then to France, where he converted to Catholicism. The English queen in exile, moved by a plea from Cowley, sent him to Rome with a letter of recommendation to Cardinal Pallotta, whose secretary he became. Crashaw’s life might have taken on the heroic dimensions and the stigmata of the martyr, but he did not succeed in becoming another Southwell.6 The immoral, debauched behaviour of the Cardinal’s court was an affront to his integrity and he openly denounced the scandalous situation, with the result that Pallotta thought it wise to remove him. In the year of his premature death he was given a benefice at the sanctuary of Loreto,7 but died a few weeks later, in August 1649, and was buried in the local basilica. Since he had made enemies in Rome, a rumour was spread in England, and believed, that he had been poisoned. § 17. Crashaw II: Cupid desensualized Crashaw criticism is about 100 years old. At first, and for several decades, it was held back by problems of sources: the twenty-nine-year-old Mario Praz gained a reputation as the best tracker of echoes and imitations of Crashaw’s first published work, Epigrammatum Sacrorum Liber (1634). Praz showed in 1925 that epigrammatic, emblematic and Marinist traditions, 5 6 7

Canonized by the Catholic Church in 1622. Volume 1, § 47.2. Light needs to be shed on this appointment, since there is no record that Crashaw, an Anglican minister at Cambridge, was ever ordained a Catholic priest.

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along with Jesuit Latin poetry, arrived in England and gathered followers from all confessions. All this criticism, including Praz – devoured by the readers of the day – is nowadays practically unreadable in so far as pure erudition, though not without some valuable scraps of information of a general or particular nature. Since Crashaw died at the age of thirty-seven, it follows that most of his English poems were written in little more than a decade, without interruption; but, as with other poets who died young, the internal chronology is uncertain. This is no great problem, as inspiration is gradual, unitary and centripetal. Problems of textual criticism are more complex and open, given that the author himself, forever on the move after 1643, was unable to prepare his books for printing himself. 1646 saw the publication of Steps to the Temple, with a preface by an anonymous editor; the book was republished in 1648 with revisions and the addition of other poems, some of them non-religious, grouped together in a separate section, The Delights of the Muses. In 1652 the posthumous Carmen Deo nostro was published in Paris, complete with illustrations and marred by printing errors, with a dedication to the Countess of Denbigh. In this progressively expanding corpus, some of Crashaw’s major poems appear three times, with various textual variations, like cuts or additions of material, so that the question must always be asked: which is the right version? 2. Steps to the Temple is a short miscellany that seems to show that Crashaw was not yet ready to fly with his own wings, and that he preferred to remain in the shadow and protection of more established poets, translating or adapting their works: Herbert, Marino, the Psalmist, the Evangelist. In his case it is wise to abstain from the usual deploration because the original texts are revitalized in often quite personal adaptations. Il sospetto d’Herode (Herod’s Suspicion) is itself a signal, in that it is a paraphrase, not a literal translation, of the first book of Marino’s Strage degli innocenti (The Slaughter of the Innocents). It has the merit of bolstering the weakness of the original (the experts, Praz in the forefront, judge Crashaw to be a better poet than Marino on the grounds of this version), and of giving Milton some ideas for his Satan.8 It is also an example of what Crashaw’s poetry would not become: he shows remarkable skill in writing narrative verse which is

8

PMI, 14.

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flowing and clear, and in which the content, though not original, is well structured and organized. Crashaw here makes great use of a premonitory epithet, the meaning of which he will subsequently invert – ‘flaming’ – here obviously referring to Satan. Music’s Duel, variations on a poem by the Jesuit Famiano Strada, narrates the singing contest between a nightingale and a lutenist,9 and succeeds in proving a rare example of translation and the description, in highly suggestive language, of the sounds of the music. Crashaw failed to complete the translation of the Strage but at last found his own voice in the choral and dialogic poem In the Glorious Epiphany of Our Lord (on the journey of the Magi) and in In the Holy Nativity, where the shepherds see the light that comes from the eyes of the Infant Jesus, the eyes that have dethroned the sun and now turn night into an eternal dawn. 3. The series of paraphrases and evangelical meditations on the Cross already contains most of Crashaw’s stock of imagery – a limited number of symbols and metaphors repeated in unexpected combinations, often so daring as to be found nowhere else, save, perhaps, Thompson, Hopkins and – according to Praz – Swinburne. ‘The Tear’ is shed by ‘Maria’, who might already be Mary Magdalen; the tear is also a spark and a diamond made of water; in the course of the eight stanzas it becomes a falling star, a drop of rich wine, one of a choir of angels. The starting point for Crashaw as the contemplating and contemplative poet is the eye that weeps before the Cross, so that the tears bathe the feet of the crucified Christ; but it is also the point of arrival, with, in the middle, a whole host of metaphors that tumble out in a flurry of logical and icastic leaps and bounds. Each single icastic circuit leads to tautology: a tear weeps for itself, in a kind of ‘etymological figure’ which is common in Crashaw: that is to say, a construction based on concentricity rather than linear sequence. Crashaw’s great odes and great hymns celebrating martyrs are characterized, or vitiated, by being a series of stanzas connected by loose-linked chains, so that the connections are often very weak or imperceptible. The most daring device is that of intersecting semantic fields, where one metaphor is joined to, or runs into, a second one, and the second to a third, but where the fields are 9

A much abused anecdote that also appears in The Lover’s Melancholy by Ford (Volume 1, § 145.1). Cf. Praz 1958, 246 and n. 80.

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heterogeneous: as in that part of the hymn to St Teresa where the dart is dipped in the rich flame which writes the name of Christ on the vault of heaven. Crashaw often abandons himself to this kind of icastic propagation and seems so intent on it that, at a time when criticism, especially in Italy and France, was occupied with the relationship between signifier and signified, his poems were pointed to as ‘mere self-indulgence to displays of wit’.10 The most frequent metamorphosis is the essence of Baroque, and concerns spiritualized bodily love, or spiritual love that is projected, but only metaphorically, onto the body, and performs all the actions leading to physical arousal, but all, so to speak, for nothing. In other words, love is really the Cupid of tradition, and Cupid would like to shoot his darts, only he can’t, because his quiver is empty. ‘Wishes to His Supposed Mistress’11 is one of the few significant non-religious poems by Crashaw and, at the same time, a parody of the mythological theme of the birth of Venus; but little by little the reader sees that it is also a virtual epithalamium, with no particular wedding. The Platonic ‘idea’ is incarnated, but enters a little temple of pure crystal so that the flesh does not defile it. Faced with this, desire denies its true essence and declares its own absence, turning into an ungiven kiss. The heart of the poem polemicizes on the fact that beauty lies in accessories and is by these elevated and intensified; instead, nature triumphs over art, in this case, cosmetic art.12 Sadness at having to renounce the flesh is apparent after this parenthesis. Why is a blushing cheek a text that saddens the reader? Because it stirs his senses but reason tells him he must abstain. From now on, the poem is dominated by an argument based on, one might say, thrusts and sallies: each part of the female body excites the senses, which are immediately reined in – the repeatedly heard conjunction is ‘yet’. The kisses 10

11 12

M. Pagnini, ‘Introduzione’, in Lirici carolini e repubblicani, Napoli 1961, 23. Crashaw would seem to fit perfectly the definition of Metaphysical poetry given by Johnson (cf. Volume 1, § 75.2 and n. 30), but was not included in the main exponents of the school. In particular, Crashaw had platonic relationships with Ferrar’s niece, Mary Collet, with the Countess of Denbigh, and with Queen Maria Henrietta herself. Maybe this is a swipe at Herrick, who was in the habit of rejoicing in the contribution of fashion to female beauty, and a nod of deference to Herbert who, as a young man, inveighed against the ‘false hair’ of women.

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the poet would like to plant on the lady’s face are theoretical, possible, but they return – even if attempted in his imagination – ‘carry[ing] nothing thence away’. In reality, Crashaw ends up by admitting that some mysterious bewitching power exudes from this chaste, natural beauty: it gives, it takes back, and so it teases. Cupid has a quiver, as we have seen, but no arrows! Smiles ‘warm/ The blood’, we are told explicitly. Other signs of arousal are misinterpreted: sexual consummation, as in Spenser’s epithalamia, is chaste in marriage, though the loss of virginity is bewailed. 4. In ‘The Weeper’, a probably early ode of Dionysian ecstasy which displays red-hot imagination at work in an orgy of imagery, the eyes of ‘The Tear’ are the radiating centre. Crashaw imagines himself to be before the figure of the weeping Magdalene, and presents, one after the other, a series of closed stanzas modelled on epigrams, conceits, at times wildly farfetched, and quips and puns roundly condemned by subsequent critics as the height of kitsch, as well as other more delicate and witty imaginative exploits. From the eyes’ twin fountains run silver streams; the eyes also spend this silver as if it were a never ending flow of precious coins; the eyes seem to be falling stars, whereas they are in fact fixed, and seeds that fecundate the earth and make it vie in brightness with the sky. The stars/tears, that is, do not fall, but ascend to heaven, because the ‘sordid’ earth cannot receive such purity. But suddenly the imagery turns to the world of the dairy: the earth’s milky rivers are quite different to the creamy stream of tears, and the sea of the heavens becomes a gigantic cup from which the cherubs drink greedily and, fortified by the precious beverage, sing their celestial songs. So begins a cluster of stanzas that show how all the most wonderful natural secretions retreat before the tears of the Magdalene. There follows another conceit: the tear is like a bud on a vine, that blushes before her violator, the sun, or ‘This watery blossom of thy eyne’ that makes wine richer, the drink of angels rejoicing for the arrival of a new guest in heaven. Stanza eighteen takes from ‘Wishes’, and repeats in the Hymns to St Teresa, the image of the dart of Cupid, transformed into the Lamb that has pierced the ‘wells’ (Magdalene’s eyes, or perhaps her breast), and opened the conduit between the heart and the eyes. Cherubs feeding on milky tears have been a cause of great amusement for critics, who have sniggered even more at the idea of a Christ in the mountains of Galilee well supplied with the ‘portable and compendious oceans’ of Mary Magdalene’s tears, which, reverting to

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the original image, again become a silver mine or mint. The Magdalene’s epitaph is of one who has always lived a life of suffering, measured out by tears, tears which descend and ascend at the same time, which rise like incense towards Heaven, but bathe and stain ‘Our Lord’s feet’. 5. Crashaw’s most accomplished work, ‘A Hymn to the Name and Honour of the Admirable Saint Teresa’, is, surprisingly, the least typical, beginning as it does in a calm, unhurried style, which is, above all, uncharacteristically argumentative – that is, really ‘metaphysical’: the first fourteen lines – by chance or by design, the length of a sonnet, though here, as throughout the Hymn, the metre is the heroic couplet – elaborate the concept (which is not a ‘conceit’) that divine love is not exemplified by martyrs who, with their suffering, have seized the heavenly crown. The same argument is found for example in Hopkins’s sonnet, ‘St Alphonsus Rodriguez’, which celebrates the unseen and unsung sanctity of the daily routine of a doorkeeper. Crashaw’s opposition, however, is between the ‘great and tall’ soldiers of the faith, and the little girl, Teresa, who feels that divine love may be given and witnessed also with and through death. In the self-sacrificial impulse checked by a voice within (‘Wise Heav’n’), counselling ‘a milder martyrdom’, Crashaw may be alluding to his own inability to die a martyr’s death, although he might have desired it. A different end, a funeral described with a splendid oxymoron, as ‘still-surviving’, was reserved for the saint instead of the blood of martyrdom. Halfway through the poem, Crashaw portrays Teresa melting into death in the arms of Christ/Love, and her slow ascent to bliss. However, he becomes his true self again and reels off an unprecedented string of pathetic fallacies, fast and furious, and morbid, the central ‘conceit’ of which is that Teresa, the Teresa of Bernini,13 has been pierced by a dart, not one, however, wielded 13

Crashaw could not actually have been inspired by the statue by Bernini in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome, which Bernini began in 1647, but the iconographic and erotic theme of the poem is plainly anticipated in an episode of the saint’s autobiography. A second hymn, ‘The Flaming Heart’, was inspired by the ‘book’ of St Teresa, and hinges on a different metamorphosis of Cupid: the saint is not pierced by the dart, but, instead, wields it in order to inflame the onlooker. The slightly repetitive argument ends with a grand litany-like coda that rings with anaphoras resembling the chords of a late Romantic symphony.

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by an angel, but a kind of spiritual phallus belonging to Christ himself, that fecundates not the womb but the soul of the saint, who takes deep pleasure in the wounding and would like it to go on forever; the dart, ‘sweetlykilling’, makes ‘delicious wounds’, which, self-healing, ‘weep / Balsam’ on themselves. With her coronation in heaven, she achieves the same goal as martyrs do with their more spectacular deaths. The Hymn ends with the saint who, like the Magdalene with her tears, accompanies Christ in his heavenly walks, crowned by the very souls she herself has helped to save and transform into stars. The reader is reminded of Rossetti’s ‘The Blessed Damozel’, which is, however, austere and restrained in comparison. Closer, but still lagging behind, is the dream assumption into Heaven of the nun in Hopkins’s ‘Deutschland’. § 18. Vaughan* Crashaw may be considered unusual, even unique, among the religious and devotional poets of the seventeenth century, in that he is extremely 1

*

Works, ed. L. C. Martin, 2 vols, Oxford 1914, and, in one vol., 1957; other editions of the complete poems, ed. F. Fogle, Garden City, NY 1964, and A. Rudrum, Harmondsworth 1976; Poetry and Selected Prose, ed. L. C. Martin, Oxford 1963; Henry Vaughan, ed. L. L. Martz, Oxford 1995. E. Blunden, On the Poetry of Henry Vaughan, London 1927; E. Holmes, Henry Vaughan and the Hermetic Philosophy, Oxford 1932; F. E. Hutchinson, Henry Vaughan: A Life and Interpretation, Oxford 1947; F. Kermode, ‘The Private Imagery of Henry Vaughan’, in Review of English Studies, N. S., I (1950), 206–25; M. M. Mahood, Poetry and Humanism, London 1950; R. Garner, Henry Vaughan: Experience and the Tradition, Chicago, IL 1959; E. C. Pettet, Of Paradise and Light: A Study of Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans, Cambridge 1960; R. A. Durr, On the Mystical Poetry of Henry Vaughan, Cambridge, MA 1962; J. Bennett, ‘Henry Vaughan’, in Five Metaphysical Poets: Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw, Marvell, Cambridge 1964, 71–89; L. L. Martz, ‘Henry Vaughan: The Caves of Memory’, in The Paradise Within: Studies in Vaughan, Traherne, and Milton, New Haven, CT 1964, 1–31; M. Leardi, La poesia di Henry Vaughan, Firenze 1967; J. D. Simmonds, Masques of God: Form and Theme in the Poetry of Henry Vaughan, Pittsburgh, PA 1972; T. O. Calhoun, Henry Vaughan: The Achievement of ‘Silex Scintillans’, Newark, DE 1981; J. F. S. Post, Henry Vaughan: The Unfolding Vision, Princeton, NJ 1982; Essential Articles for the Study of Henry Vaughan, ed. A. Rudrum, Hamden, CT 1987; J. N. Wall, Transformations of the Word: Spenser, Herbert, Vaughan, Athens, GA 1988; A. L.

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reticent about himself and not, therefore, a lyric poet, but a writer of hymns who euphorically celebrates his complete possession of God and a universe possessed by God. With Henry Vaughan (1622–1695) we are back to a poet who laments, falls into fits of melancholy, and is forever exclaiming ‘Oh dear!’ and ‘Alas!’; an eternal, discontented exile, he suffers any life which is not the heavenly one, and feels deeply and bewails the absence of God. Yet these two poets, though so different, proclaim themselves sons of the same father, testifying to and increasing the already enormous influence of Herbert after 1633.1 Vaughan used for his principal collection of poems, Silex scintillans2 (in two books, 1650–1656), the same subtitle – ‘sacred poems and personal outpourings’ – as in Herbert’s The Temple, but literal echoes and blatant copying are scattered everywhere. Vaughan’s theology is different from Herbert’s: since he was not a minister of the church, the author of Silex found God not in ecclesiastical institutions but especially, though not uniquely, in nature, which has been compromised by original sin and by a kind of degenerative drift of human history; the veil can only be lifted in rare moments of epiphanic ecstasy. This is the same veil the Victorians3 saw as coming between man and awareness of eternity. More precisely, Vaughan is a poet who instinctively ‘looks back’, to quote the Clements, Poetry of Contemplation: John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, and the Modern Period, Albany, NY 1990; S. Davis, Henry Vaughan, Bridgend 1995; J. Manning, The Swan of Usk: The Poetry of Henry Vaughan, Lampeter 2008. 1

Faintly similar in style to Crashaw is ‘The Lamp’, which weaves a confused and not entirely successful Baroque parallel between a candle that gutters and weeps human tears, and inner suffering. The candle and the lamp remain what they are, mere objects, while man does not end with death, but continues existing in an afterlife. The accompanying emblem, too, in Silex (reproduced in Martz 1964, between pages 4 and 5), evokes Baroque reminiscences: it is, in fact, Herbert’s ‘heart of stone’ and, at the same time, the crying, flaming heart of Crashaw. It is also the human heart, which is about to be pierced by a spear held in the hand of God, or rather, by two arrows or darts, in the form of snakes. 2 ‘Scintillans’ as in the verb ‘to shine’, much used by Vaughan to refer to a new-born creature, before its brightness is dimmed as it moves further from its origin and deeper into the world. 3 Volume 4, § 5.3.

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title of one of his poem: back towards the origin of life, or even before the beginning of life, towards a point that can be reached by means of the end, that is, death, which will reintegrate being in eternity. Changing his metaphor, Vaughan describes life as a fog that hides, or veils, the sun, a fog that must be pierced for the rays of the sun to shine forth. In short, he harks back to some ideal time in the past, which may be the biblical period of the Covenant, when God spoke to his prophets face to face, unlike today (his ‘Religion’ closely echoes ‘Nondum’ by Hopkins, and ‘Corruption’ covers the same conceptual journey). 2. One peak that Vaughan did climb, and from which he could survey men and events, was the Civil War; he saw an England no longer felix, an England that can be seen in Lovelace’s writings too. Vaughan’s theology contains Platonic elements from the Pauline and Augustinian tradition – to the effect that life is the gradual pollution of a pure spring water – as well as from Hermetic and occult texts. The bugbear of literary criticism up to the 1970s was what seemed to be the antithetic, alternative character of Vaughan’s Hermetism with respect to orthodox Christianity, so much so that many critics took it upon themselves to reconcile Hermetism with Catholic patristics, up to and including the great sixteenth- and seventeenth-century mystics. Vaughan’s twin brother, Thomas,4 a minister of the Anglican church, was an alchemist versed in the works of Cornelius Agrippa; some of his lines were incorporated by Henry, who outlived him. Vaughan’s poems can be read without the support of this cultural background, which, in reality, amounts to a series of vague references often based on hearsay. Vaughan is no Blake, no Yeats, who never mentions him.5 In Vaughan’s syncretism, orthodox as well as Hermetic Platonism 4 5

The author of numerous philosophical tracts, satirized by Samuel Butler in Hudibras and by Swift, he is said to have died following some outlandish alchemistic experiment. According to Kermode 1950 (in what is a rather debatable critique) Vaughan’s religious conversion was ‘exclusively poetic’, and his poetry a mere game of ‘terms’ organized (by a ‘pure and simple’ poet) ‘into a pattern that has its effect on their specific meanings’, in other words a verbal exercise stripped of real personal or authentically transcendental experience. The antithesis or concordance of orthodox mysticism and heterodox Hermetism dominated critical readings from the time of Holmes 1933, where the question (51 n. 1) was posed whether Vaughan’s poetry was not, like that

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merges with the animism and visionary imagination traditionally linked to Celtic culture. Silex scintillans was signed ‘Henry Vaughan Silurist’, an epithet used by Tacitus to refer to the Silures, a tribe of South Wales. Dylan Thomas did not number Vaughan among the forefathers of the twentiethcentury revival of Welsh poetry.6 Welsh may have been his mother tongue, or he may have been bilingual; it is a fact that he studied at Jesus College, Oxford, traditionally frequented by Welsh students, where he read Classics. He then moved to London to study law, but finally opted to be a doctor in his home country. During the Civil War he served in the royalist army, and also spent some time in prison. He wrote little in the second half of his life. The language of his poetry is the standard English of his time, without regional variations or particular elaboration of the signifiers: he avoids excessive alliteration and daring acrobatics involving interplay of vowels and consonants, and shuns overabundance in rhetorical tropes and or that magical rhythm designated as cynghanedd. The carmen figuratum remains the province of that other almost Welsh poet, Herbert. The only ‘Celtic element’ in Vaughan is the ‘faerie’ in nature and its humanization, constituting more than a mere hint of pantheism. 3. Vaughan was re-introduced to the English in a reprint published in 1847, after almost two centuries since the first appearance of his work. His most famous poem had already been appreciated by Wordsworth, and a small number of poems found their way into anthologies and had, too, their admirers. He is still popular for scraps of poetry, extrapolated from longer poems, superb fragments or incipits worthy of a great poet, easily remembered, but soon declining into prolixity. Critical reaction has often been one of superiority or impatience. Vaughan is not a craftsman of verse;

6

of Traherne, ‘distinctly animistic, with Christianity grafted on’. The debate continued with Garner 1959, 46–91, and Durr 1962, 22–6. ‘Cock-crowning’, a poem clearly moved by an unusual fit of impatience for the manifestation of and empathy with the divine, brings together many conventional Hermetic elements, like the divine seed, which is light but also present in flora and, especially, fauna, a ‘magnetism’ that announces the coming dawn and dispels the shades of night; or like the alchemic ‘tincture’ instilled in material objects, or the ‘veil’ that hides the blinding vision of the divine. However, biblical sources for all of these elements can be found. Cf. Volume 8, § 69.2.

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his poetry often ‘stumbles into prose’. Yet, unknowingly, or even through poetic incompetence, he inaugurates the fashion of the picturesque and the sentimental well ahead of their time. You might even call him a preRomantic, his eyes firmly fixed on Nature, capable of communicating a sense of place together with authentic real life experiences. Minimal plots are used as correlatives, but may be read as an end in themselves; several poems begin like naïve, ingenuous fables, sometimes very ordinary, always a bit too didactic. Vaughan always comes back to a series of recurring themes – man standing apart and mirroring himself in Nature as flora and fauna; the human condition, awaiting that eternity with which man will be reunited through death after being thrust into time when created; man’s imperfect knowledge of God and the divine; life as a fog, cloud, or subdued rays of sunlight; a sense of expectancy that foreshadows the end of the world and the Apocalypse. In an early collection of non-religious poems,7 his wife-to-be is given the Petrarchan/Spenserian name of Amoret. ‘To Amoret gone from him’, theoretically about the typical Donne theme of separation, contains stylistic elements which will later be used in his religious verse, like the suspension between ‘vision’ (personified by Fantasy, sometimes implying fear) and concrete, verifiable experience. Real pathos arises from the contemplation of Nature personified, who appears sad and discontent, and is probed by delicate, almost feminine observation. Nor should we forget that here the poet mourns the setting sun and the approaching shadows that darken most lives. At the same time, Vaughan implies the existence of universal concord on the basis of the tenuous connecting force of ‘influence’. ‘I walked the other day’ opens with one of those narrative introductions that appear casual and quite ordinary, but are really spellbinding. The poet is looking for a flower in a field, and, as he cannot find it, he decides to dig a hole in the ground; this introduces

7

Poems, with the Tenth Satire of Juvenal Englished (1646). This was followed in 1651 by another non-religious collection, Olor Iscanus, or The Swan of Usk, the river near his native town. It is said that Vaughan’s conversion to religious verse was occasioned by a serious illness. He translated, somewhat erratically, various tracts of minor Latin authors, and wrote a biography of one Paulinus, bishop of Nola. Thalia Rediviva, published in 1678, is his fourth collection of non-religious poems.

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the allegory of a ‘warm recluse’ who takes shelter during the winter, thus limiting the damage incurred ‘in this air’. The allegorical references are to man in his earthly existence, as well as to the poet, in his Welsh retreat, preparing himself to return whence he came: life as a tomb, or as winter; so perhaps this poem by Vaughan should be added to the list of influences that helped shape the opening lines of Eliot’s Waste Land. The poet envies the flower: it is not excessively impatient for spring to arrive, and indeed is quite comfortable in its underground retreat. In ‘The Bird’, too, the creature of the title takes refuge in the warmth of the nest against thunderstorms and lightning, which are more suited to human obstinacy, and joins in the chorus of Nature in thanking God for the end of the storm. ‘The World’ begins with the most famous lines in all of Vaughan’s works: ‘I saw Eternity the other night / Like a great ring of pure and endless light’, and this bright ring has in train the world full of suffering represented by allegorical settings reminiscent of Langland or Bunyan: the lover, the politician, the miser. The poor and wretched are contrasted with the poor but devout, who ascend to the ring of eternity. So, Vaughan presents a kind of apocalypse, in which the world is caught up and hurled towards the Last Judgement in the poet’s visionary vortex.8 ‘The Waterfall’ illustrates clearly Vaughan’s typical poetic method: an initial descriptive scene is followed by an anagogic coda, which perhaps the poet intended to be the most important part, but which appears forced, so that one prefers, as in some poems by Leopardi, the descriptive scene without coda. In these pre-Romantic and even Romantic poems written in or from a certain place only this specific indication is missing; but the poet has lingered ‘pensive’ by the waterfall. This adjective, ‘pensive’, was to be dear to Wordsworth, and the Vaughan poem he no doubt remembered was ‘The Retreat’, yet another nostalgic meditation on lost innocence, symbolized by the light of archetypal purity now found only in Nature, ‘weaker glories’, that is a faint reflexion of eternity. ‘The Night’ is an equally enigmatic inquiry into divine knowledge, now more difficult than at the time of Nicodemus, 8

In the last enigmatic stanza some lingering penitents do not join in the upward movement and, lazy and sluggish, stay in ‘the night’, whispering that the ring is reserved by the groom for his bride.

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who sought out Jesus at night in the Gospel of John. Indefatigable poet of light, the light of the sun, synonymous and homophonous with the Son of God, Vaughan intones a passionate, exceptional, Novalis-like hymn to night, the Romantic time of fancy, of rhapsody, of creative imagination. The poet yearns for the night, the ‘dazzling darkness’, to become the way to a panic fusion, in contrast with the ‘ill guiding’ light of day. § 19. Traherne* I: A foretaste of Paradise The events which led, after more than a century, to the discovery, or rediscovery, of the works of Thomas Traherne (1636–1674) could well be the plot of a literary thriller or puzzle, in the manner of The Aspern Papers by Henry James, Possession by A. S. Byatt, or the films that have been made of them. Mild, seraphic Traherne’s only publication while still living was a work of theological controversy, Roman Forgeries, in the form of a dialogue – passionate and all-out, with an adversary who is more imagined than real – on the ‘false historical guarantees’ of the Catholic Church. A Christian Ethics was published (1675) just after his death, followed, twenty-four years later, by Thanksgivings (1699), a collection of paraphrases and imitations of the Psalms. Another minor prose work appeared at the

*

Works, ed. J. Ross, 6 vols of 8, Cambridge 2005–, will replace earlier editions including the vast number of unpublished manuscript material available; the edition by H. M. Margoliouth, 2 vols, Oxford 1958, is still useful, and prints on opposite pages the poems that were not amended by Philip Traherne. A recent anthology is Happiness and Holiness: Thomas Traherne and His Writings, ed. D. Inge, London 2009. Q. Iredale, Traherne, Oxford 1935; G. I. Wade, Thomas Traherne, Princeton, NJ 1944; L. L. Martz, ‘Thomas Traherne: Confessions of Paradise’, in The Paradise Within: Studies in Vaughan, Traherne, and Milton, New Haven, CT and London 1964, 33–102; K. W. Salter, Thomas Traherne: Mystic and Poet, London 1964; A. L. Clements, The Mystical Poetry of Thomas Traherne, Cambridge, MA 1969; A. Rizzardi, La poesia di Thomas Traherne, Urbino 1969; S. Stewart, The Expanded Voice: The Art of Thomas Traherne, San Marino, CA 1970; R. D. Jordan, The Temple of Eternity: Thomas Traherne’s Philosophy of Time, Port Washington, NY and London 1972; M. M. Day, Thomas Traherne, Boston, MA 1982; A. L. DeNeef, Traherne in Dialogue: Heidegger, Lacan, and Derrida, Durham, NC and London 1988; G. Dowell, Enjoying the World: The Rediscovery of Thomas Traherne, London 1990.

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beginning of the new century. The problems revolving round the two works for which Traherne is famous today began much later, when, in 1896, a bibliophile spotted, on a London bookstall, two manuscript volumes of prose and poetry, and bought them for a few pennies. This discovery was little less momentous and significant than Browning’s coming across the records of the trial that were to inspire him to write The Ring and the Book. The lucky bibliophile entrusted the manuscripts to the editor Grosart, who attributed them to Henry Vaughan, and was about to include them in a new edition of Vaughan’s works. Providentially, he died before he could do so; he had made a great mistake. The MS volumes were handed to another editor, Bertram Dobell, who realized that the author was not Vaughan but Traherne; his conclusion was based on such strong evidence that the volume of poems was published in 1903 and that of the prose in 1908, both as the authentic work of Thomas Traherne. But that was not the end of the story: two years later a manuscript deposited at the British Museum was published under the title of Poems of Felicity. Thomas Traherne, like Vaughan, had a brother, Philip, younger than him and, like him, a minister. Philip copied out some of Thomas’s poems in this manuscript, which was meant to be published but, for unknown reasons, never was. So in 1910 the poetic corpus of Traherne consisted of the amalgam of these two subtexts, presented as a co-production by Thomas and Philip, whose interventions were to be forever deplored by subsequent editors determined to establish the original intentions of Thomas. Traherne really does deserve to be considered the most ‘rediscovered’ and most belatedly canonized writer in English literature, given that the textual saga was given a further twist in 1967 when another manuscript (Commentaries of Heaven) was discovered just in time to avoid being burned. It was published in 1989. Until not long ago, an enormous number of manuscripts was known to be held by various libraries; the Cambridge University Press is preparing to publish the complete works of Traherne, bringing to an end, it is believed, this intricate, centuries-long editorial adventure. 2. It was worth looking in some detail at the various stages of the ‘discovery’ of Traherne not only because it is a strange, intriguing story in itself, but because of the repercussions as regards the evolving idea and identity of this writer. Having access to the complete corpus has meant

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jettisoning many constructions and reconstructions built on the basis of an incomplete corpus, and shifting the centre of attention to works that were previously absent from the Traherne canon.1 So, for example, it was always thought that the three polemical pamphlets, already known, were negligible, only to discover, in the light of the ‘new’ documents, that they are, instead, rich in foreshadowings and signals of things to come, so much so that they deserve to take their place in the field of English Protestant theology. After 1908, Traherne as a poet was considered a lesser Vaughan, and seemed destined to grow in stature as a prose writer and mystic by virtue of his principal prose collection, Centuries of Meditations. When it appears, the complete edition of his works will no doubt change received ideas. While his poetry has by now been catalogued, and is not likely to vary much, Traherne’s reputation as a theologian and religious thinker will be enhanced, and he will be recognized as a forerunner of twentiethcentury psychology and psychoanalysis, and even of certain aspects of poststructuralism. For now, his poetry is that of an anonymous precursor of various mystic-visionary poets. Vaughan and Traherne seemed interchangeable and looked upon as twins because both were Welsh and both wrote visionary religious verse. Traherne, however, came from a poor family – his father was a shoemaker. He graduated in theology at Oxford, was a frequenter of the community of Susanna Hopton (similar to that of Little Gidding or to the future Wesleyan cells), parish priest and then, from 1669, chaplain to an eminent politician. It should be recalled, at this point, that Vaughan and Traherne owed their celebration of the divine in Nature to the Puritans’ savage pruning of religious ritual: the Church expands and becomes the whole of creation, consecrated by union with the divine. For years, Vaughan and Traherne lived about twenty-five miles from one another; but they may never have actually met.2 As an Anglican priest,

1 2

Cf. the opinion of the reviewer of Ross 2005 in TLS (25 March 2011, 23), that Commentaries of Heaven, a huge treatise of systematic logic, is destined to be considered the author’s most important work. However, literal echoes suggest that Traherne had read Silex: see, for example, the ‘herbs and trees’ that end ‘Walking’, a phrase that is also found in line 23 of Vaughan’s ‘The Night’. Cf. also Rizzardi 1969, 59.

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Traherne was very attentive to ritual, and in this resembled Herbert and the country vicar of his handbook. He looks ahead to Blake, Wordsworth, Hopkins, even Whitman and Joyce. It is immediately obvious that he celebrates the innocence of the child as against the experience of the grown-up; this essential opposition reminds just about everyone of Blake. Traherne’s poetic voice is adult, but it merges with that of the wondering child who still lives within him – a celebration of original innocence that can be recovered, and must always be jealously guarded like a priceless treasure. Traherne, the Anglican priest who at first found favour with the Puritans, challenges and overturns Calvinist positions on predestination and original sin. Joyce intermingled at lightning speed authors that had just been discovered, and that he had read there and then, digesting and assimilating them, like Traherne3 whose poetry is, at bottom, just about one thing: the certainty that God is good and dwells in Nature, whose duty it is to praise Him, take what was made for His creatures, use it, and give it back more beautiful than ever. One of the poems is appropriately titled ‘The Circulation’. ‘Antepast of Paradise’ is a phrase used in the poem ‘Innocence’, in an involuntarily ambiguous sense (I believe) or with a dual semantic charge: it is the foretaste of Heaven reserved to children (the image brings to mind Crashaw’s metaphors in ‘The Weeper’); but ‘ante past’ is also that antecedent state of Adam in the earthly paradise before the Fall, and that the child enjoys for as long as he is a child. This kind of poetics, with such a concrete and simple message, carries with it certain risks, of which the poet was aware. He seems not to care about traditional poetic grace, rhythm, refined diction or varied imagery. If Vaughan is on the edge of the Welsh koinè, Traherne is outside it, cut off from the host of precursors of a Dylan Thomas.4 In his prose, Traherne is creative and innovative in his language, while as a poet his vocabulary appears limited.

3

4

Echoes of Traherne (the third number of the third Century) are found in a passage describing Stephen’s walk in the third episode of Ulysses. As was pointed out above, Traherne was published in 1903 and in 1908, the very time when Joyce was working on his novel. The allusion to ‘Walking’ is significant, since Traherne’s optimistic theology is not far from that of Joyce. But cf. Salter 1964, 92, and Rizzardi 1969, 102.

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His store of adjectives is confined to a few conventional, well-worn terms like ‘fine’, ‘splendid’, ‘great’ or ‘glorious’. His most obvious defect is the close repetition of the same word, even if it is at times a case of polyptoton. Conceptual repetition is required by the aim of the poem, whether it be to preach or to teach, and the corresponding rhetorical techniques are the appeal and the apostrophe, an abstract statement or exhortation being reinforced by various concrete examples, and exclamations which affirm that his belief is spotless. ‘The Rapture’5 both expresses and dissembles Traherne’s eminently laudatory vein. Strangely enough, Traherne is unfamiliar with the idea of reticence, or understatement, or doubt tout court, and sounds fearlessly affirmative. Creation is always marvellous, Nature wonderful, with no intermediate states. 3. In the long run, Traherne tires: he is a relentless retailer of theological tracts and Marlovian rodomontades. His weakness lies in the risk of monotony: all the poems sooner or later merge to form a relatively small nucleus of simple statements that ring with the silver sounds of hymns of praise to the beauty of creation. ‘The Salutation’ is particularly effective in expressing the message that birth, every birth, and therefore creation itself, corresponds to an awakening to the wonders of nature; this is what the child exclaims when he becomes aware of the marvel of his body – the various limbs miraculously connected to his trunk – and of creation as a whole – the stars, the oceans, and all the rest like a treasure, a ‘prize’, to use a word and a concept dear to Hopkins, especially in his ‘The Starlight Night’. As from now, Traherne announces the finalism of a cosmos created for the benefit of man, who takes possession of it and subdues it. ‘Amendment’ confirms that God’s gifts are even more resplendent when man makes use of them. The divine works are boundless, and man, made in God’s image, becomes divine.6 But the world, created for man, God’s image, must be returned to God. ‘Wonder’ takes its title from a state of 5 6

By chance, or by polemical design, this poem inverts its erotic namesake – apart from the article – by Carew (§ 10.4). For example, in ‘Innocence’ Traherne goes dangerously close to the Pelagian heresy believing and stating that man is born ‘without the stain of sin’ – and so remains, at least as long as he is a child. Cf. at greater length Salter 1964, 130–5.

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mind that is constant and pervasive in Traherne: absolute, ecstatic wonder at the beauty of creation. ‘Walking’ goes beyond and against Wordsworth and all those poets who exalt childhood and the child’s intuitive knowledge: Traherne states that intuition is not sufficient, and it is necessary to live ‘in thought’. The child is not nearer to the source of knowledge, but is simply unaware: the basic idea is the mobility of the adult mind as against the passive perceptivity of the child (of the cart, or wheel, or the puppet). Fortunately the poet at times makes us privy to his fears, and of the rare moments when his optimism falters, giving way to bouts of cosmic existentialist solitude. Traherne calls the fall from childish wonder ‘apostasy’; in other words, Carlyle’s ‘everlasting yea’ is replaced by a growing ‘no’, which is not eternal, but temporary, when the adult succumbs to worldly vanity. In ‘Shadows in the Waters’, a prelude states that the child tends to mistake appearance for reality; in actual fact the appearances are not false but partly true suggestions and ‘intimations’. The poet goes on to tell of his imagining another possible world under the surface of the water he is leaning over. This is not, therefore, a devout or ecstatic poem, or even indirectly religious, although it does suggest the theological question of whether God has created other worlds besides ours. Traherne wonders who those ghosts are under the surface, and he identifies them as his ‘second beings’. In ‘Solitude’ he confesses to a passing moment of despair; the surrounding sights are invited in vain to give him joy, and the poem ends without his search – perhaps for a new Eden on earth – meeting with success. In the end, modern taste chooses these existentialist interruptions, however short-lived, of the usual songs of praise for man and the beauties of creation. § 20. Traherne II: ‘Centuries of Meditations’ In Centuries of Meditations, too, the dazzling, ever-shining light can become dim, and the vision fade, not because innocence is lost definitively, but because it has been lost sight of, overwhelmed by experience and habit, and the routine of everyday life. The basic concept here is the infinite love of God and the unshakeable belief that everything was created for a purpose. Anyone looking for parallels with Ignatian meditation will find that Traherne accentuates and repeats the opening sentence of Ignatius’

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Spiritual Exercises. The purpose is to use the world, indeed to enjoy the gift of life to the full – to ‘prize’ it. This is the key point of the Ignatian creed that was to prove so problematical for Hopkins, whose Jesuitism was weakened and his doubts multiplied by this invitation.7 From beginning to end of the meditations the same thought is found in repeated anaphoric paraphrases. The first ‘century’ focuses on the paradisiacal state of human life, and on the opposing forces that prevent us from perceiving and reliving it. In the second, the theme is human love extended to all creatures, not only to one person. In the third, which comprises the author’s spiritual autobiography together with valuable circumstantial information, Traherne admits that innocence is lost as one grows up, but affirms that it may be recovered through meditation. Here, he identifies with David, the singer and author of the Psalms. In the fourth he exalts love turned into action through good works. Four hundred meditations numbered from one to 100 are distributed in four ‘centuries’, arranged according to a mystical progression or irradiation; a fifth is unfinished, and contains only ten meditations. The title was not decided by the author; there is a theory that he wanted to call it The Way to Happiness and composed the meditations along with his poems as two interactive, interdependent bodies of work. They were written for a friend, perhaps Susanna Hopton, to instruct and encourage her; hence the uninterrupted use of the entreaty form. The last pages were left blank, to be filled with thoughts that might arise from a reading of the meditations. The style of Centuries is aphorismatic, the average length not exceeding half a page: each is therefore an often paratactic chain of a few short paragraphs. § 21. Quarles Francis Quarles (1592–1644) was a truly versatile and prolific writer. After completing his education, he became part of the royal court, and 7

Martz 1964 finds and discusses other references to several sources of Catholic meditation, from Augustine (in reality, more argued against than followed) to St Bonaventure, the Platonism of Hermes and Pico della Mirandola, and the Cambridge Platonists. Others have found echoes and hints of Julian of Norwich, with whom Traherne could hardly be familiar.

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travelled to Germany in Princess Elizabeth’s retinue. Subsequently he became secretary to the Primate of Ireland and ended his career as a courtier in the position of ‘chronologist’. He began as a writer of biblical paraphrases and admonitory verses which reminded readers that they were dust and to dust would return. He then composed a romance in the manner of Sidney’s Arcadia. These, and other minor works, are surpassed by Emblems, published in 1635 and extended in 1639 under the title of Emblems and Hieroglyphics. Enchiridion, a collection of aphorisms, was published in 1640. The first English emblem texts were by Geoffrey Whitney (1586) and Henry Peacham (1612), followed in 1633 by Partheneia sacra, signed only by the initials H. A., in all probability an English Jesuit.1 George Wither, too, played an important role in bringing to England and helping to establish a genre that originated in Venice with Alciati in 1531, and which the Counter-Reformation had made its own. Quarles, however, remains the background, the atmosphere and reference point of late Metaphysical religious poets like Herbert, Crashaw and Vaughan. A specially created emblem often served as a mise en abyme and conveyed the overall tone of the various collections of these poets; indeed, their poetic texts invite and evoke an emblem even if no such emblem is present in the book: a certain way of thinking, of composing and of reading a written text had by this time become consolidated. Frontispieces gave rise to a literary and visual genre in the form of union and symbiosis. Bearing in mind this valuable intermediary role played by emblems, those by Quarles in themselves have been and still are victims of a categorically dismissive verdict based on a concettismo which is mechanical, amateur and unrefined, and aimed at an audience that is no longer the elite readership of Donne and his followers. Quarles is responsible for one of many transplants in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, in that the engravings were taken from two Jesuit emblem books – Typus Mundi (1627) and Pia Desideria by the Dutch author Herman Hugo. Basically, these are books of meditations, inevitably so, given their Jesuit lineage: in other words, yet another

1

PSL, 257 n. 1.

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example of a successful model being explicitly rejected and at the same time surreptitiously adapted and used for different ends. The Latin of the original is replaced by English to ensure understanding by a wider public, and new, more striking, rhetorical devices are employed.2 The emblem is composed of an engraving on the left hand page with, on the right hand, a phrase or sentence from the Bible, followed by a text in various poetic forms, and ending with quotations from various religious authorities and a four-line epigram. It is an example of composite, progressive hermeneutics, as Quarles implied when he termed the emblem ‘a silent parable’, pointing out that God himself spoke in olden days by signs, images, and even through hieroglyphics. The engravings are contained in five books each with fifteen emblems. Beginning with the temptation and Fall, they tell the story of Man’s folly and obstinacy. ‘Man’ for Quarles is the same incorrigible creature we find in Langland, Barclay and Bunyan; his stupidity, indifference, gullibility and neglect of the spiritual dimension are accentuated by the engravings which are sometimes horrific, spectral and monstrous, at other times caricatural and verging on the humorous. It is, perhaps, surprising, that this much maligned, unexceptional emblemist, not extremely popular, widely unread, was one of the favourite authors of Lamb, Browning and Thoreau. Quarles was popular in America among the descendants of Puritan exiles, though he himself suffered not a little at the hands of zealots, who seized and burned his manuscripts, accusing him of writing a pamphlet in favour of the king. § 22. King Only non-Protestants could possibly be surprised by the fact that, before the eighteenth century with its libertine abbés, a bishop could write and publish, without scandal, frivolous lyrics like ‘Tell me no more how

2

Jesuit iconography based on tears, hearts, wings and de-sensualized Cupids (§ 17) was replaced in Protestant tradition by scenes illustrating proverbial verses from the Bible. Quarles is somewhere in the middle, given the frequency with which he portrays chubby cherubs next to hearts pierced by Love’s arrows.

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fair she is’1 (and other Cavalier-like offerings) by Henry King (1592–1669), son of the Bishop of London, educated at Oxford, Anglican primate of Winchester, removed by the Puritans, reinstated at the Restoration, and appointed by Charles II court preacher. England’s history and tradition are not those of Catholic Europe: English bishops and cardinals, like Newman and Wiseman, were to venture into the territory of non-religious writing aimed not only at pleasing but also at edifying the reader.2 King’s rather small poetic oeuvre includes occasional verse written for specific events, such as his elegies on John Donne, Sir Walter Ralegh and Charles I. In 1624, the death of his twenty-four-year-old wife, Anne Berkeley, inspired him to write ‘The Exequy’, his most professional poem, so to speak, but nonetheless touching in its pathos, expressed not as form and ritual, but directly and passionately. Donne’s extravagant concettism gives way to the sober classicism of Jonson. This extraordinary, unique poem is one of a small number of seventeenth-century funeral orations in memory of the deceased wives of famous poets, and such is its fervour and power to move, so universal its appeal, that it is easy to imagine it still being read as a farewell to loved ones in England today. Grief is shown and avowed by the bereaved in the tears he sheds, but the ode, divided into numerically irregular groups of rhyming octosyllabic lines, is controlled, at times mimetic, never incoherent. Of course, a future bishop must play down the human protest against a God who cuts short the life of a young woman of twenty-four; he cannot remonstrate, and so, like Hopkins – using the same words that Hopkins uses in his sonnet, ‘Thou art indeed just, Lord’ – he gently contests, and ends up by accepting, the divine will. King defines his poem a funeral complaint rather than a dirge; this is the first of a series of oppositions and corrections: the poet places on the grave a wreath, not of flowers, but of ‘weeping verse’. The semantic axis, in turn, represents time and its double

1 2

Entitled ‘a sonnet’, though it has three six-line stanzas; it is therefore a sonnet only in the loose sense often found in English usage. The first edition of King’s English poems (he also wrote in Greek and Latin) appeared in 1657. Another bishop (of Oxford and of Norwich), with a curriculum similar to that of King, Richard Corbett (1582–1635), wrote even more unusual verse: his Iter Boreale, for example, recounts the journey of four ‘clerks of Oxford’ to the north of England.

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measurement – from the viewpoint of the deceased, then of the bereaved. The loved one’s death was ‘untimely’ while for the poet his own death and consequent reunion with his wife is exasperatingly slow in coming. Not only does time seem to stand still; ‘preposterous’, it goes backwards. Little by little, associations build up in layers, or alternate, cross-fertilizing naturally and without ostentation. The dear departed is a book, or rather a whole library, read with ‘wet glasses’; then she becomes the light of the stars or of the sun for the bereaved, who now finds himself the sleepless prisoner of the night. He begins to fantasize, like Admetus bereaved of Alcestis: if her absence were limited in time, it would be bearable; but then he is brought back to reality and must accept the fact that the light of his life is gone forever. All that remains is to await patiently the glorious though distant day when, echoing Donne’s ‘The Relique’, ‘our bodies shall aspire / To our soules bliss’. His appeal passes temporarily to the earth, to which the poet’s pain and loss will bring joy and benefits (the earth will receive the interest that he could not keep). The final prayer is one of the high points of emotion in English elegiac verse, and returns to the reflection on the two perceptions of time I have mentioned above, and to the fervent hope for reunion with the beloved, a reunion which is slow in coming despite the poet’s attempts to accelerate it. The road towards reunion is expressed in seafaring terms at first; then the metaphor changes and becomes military – the vanguard seizing the victory that should by rights have belonged to the older of the two soldiers. Victory, here, is death – the defeat of life. § 23. Cowley No evanescent figure, this: an outstanding personality, a far from anonymous voice, one of the possible alternatives and intermediate links of English literature before and after the Restoration – Abraham Cowley (1618–1667) is all of these. If we except Milton and, possibly, Marvell, this period is characterized by a lack of intellectual giants, or even bizarre geniuses, while having an abundance of skilful purveyors of pleasing verses. For this very reason, Cowley was from the start the beneficiary of an extraordinary, meteoric rise to fame. In 1692, he is recorded as being the most popular and most read poet in English,1 whereas only fifty years later, Pope 1

According to the diarist Evelyn, his funeral was second only to that of Sidney in pomp and the number of mourners.

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is to be found wondering who on earth still read him. Since then his fame has plummeted, so that nowadays he is read in drastically reduced form, the emphasis being placed more and more on his highly readable essays, the laconic style of which is redolent of Bacon, rather than on his poetry, which elicits faint praise expressed in adjectives like ‘bland’, ‘precise’, ‘dry’, even ‘arid’, and consequently not ‘moving’ or ‘musical’.2 The extent to which Cowley stands out in the seventeenth-century landscape is clear in the light of the salient facts of his literary biography: first of all, reactions to his work are split; some are subjective, dramatic and positive, others objective and uncompromisingly negative. Cowley found himself caught between the massive literary personalities of Donne and Milton, and was squashed by them. By the middle of the seventeenth century, the Metaphysical poetics had all but crumbled, leaving ruins here and there to be ransacked. Donne’s amalgam of reason and imagination was no longer tenable. However, while still tending towards the ideal of rationalism, Cowley was subject to the tug of tradition. Dr Johnson begins his Lives (arranged in chronological, not alphabetical order) with this, the ‘last and greatest Metaphysical poet’ in what is the first modern critique and assessment of Cowley. Saintsbury describes him affectionately as a ‘Janus’, looking both forwards and backwards, and T. S. Eliot saw him as the last Metaphysical and first Augustan.3 Others have mocked the Don Abbondio in him, a spineless mediocrity, forever vulnerable and unprepared in the face of the fatal summons of history in the mid-seventeenth century.4 2. Cowley stands out among his contemporaries as an enfant prodige, a son, not of the Church or the aristocracy, but of the educated, enquiring 2

3 4

The modern edition of Cowley’s collected works appeared, at a leisurely pace, in 1989, in six volumes, ed. T. O. Calhoun et al., Newark, DE and London. To date, the bibliography amounts to one biography, fewer than five critical works, and a handful of essays. An excellent selection is to be found in Poetry and Prose, ed. L. C. Martin, Oxford 1949, which includes the seventeenth-century biography by T. Sprat, and a number of contemporary evaluations. T. S. Eliot, ‘A Note on Two Odes of Cowley’, in J. Dover Wilson et al., Seventeenth Century Studies Presented to Sir Herbert Grierson, Oxford 1938, 235–42. A portrait by Lely in the National Portrait Gallery shows a plump gentleman, already eighteenth-century, in flowing robes, clean-shaven, with an abundant head of shoulder-length auburn hair parted in the middle; the face is full and slightly swollen, with a hint of shadows under the eyes, which are large and with a lost look in them.

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middle class (his father was a bookseller in London). While still a child he showed signs of ambition, talent and versatility, and by the age of twentyfive he had already debuted in almost every literary genre, from poetry to prose and on to drama. In 1644, on the threshold of an academic career at Cambridge, he decided, instead, to accompany the queen to Paris as her secretary; his duties included deciphering coded messages and spying. He returned for a while to Cromwell’s England in 1654, and was imprisoned for several months on suspicion of plotting against the Protector’s life. His preface to the 1656 edition of his poetry contains ambiguous, perhaps opportunistic, statements recognizing the need for political equidistance. The queen (by now, ex-queen) suspected no duplicity, and, after the Restoration, reinstated him in his Cambridge fellowship, allowing him to assume the long-desired role of mild-mannered, reclusive country squire. Thus Cowley abandoned the fray and dedicated himself to meditation and his garden. He spoke out generously in favour of Crashaw,5 unaware that by doing so he was thrusting him into the savage maw of Rome and, in effect, shortening his life. Attentive to the march of time, fervently progressive, as Eliot pointed out, he welcomed the rise of scientific thought, and was one of the founders of the Royal Society. He wrote verses in praise of Hobbes and Bacon, and took a personal and active interest in medicine, botany and herbalism. Judged purely as a poet, Cowley can be credited with far-reaching innovations in contemporary poetry. He expresses the entire gamut of literature in the seventeenth century, beginning as a young ‘Spenserian’, then going through a Jonsonian phase with Latin and Greek verse and satirical plays; then comes a Cavalier period, with ‘metaphysicality’ purged of passion and transformed into cold, verbal wit. Like many others, he divided his attention between the serious and the frivolous, and wrote, in later life, not one but two long historical epics, besides relaunching the Pindaric ode, a form that was to be taken up and perfected by the Victorians and Decadents. 3. Cowley decided to become a poet after finding in his home a copy of The Faerie Queene. So the author of Poetical Blossoms (1633) should be

5

§ 16.3, and see below for the ode in honour of Crashaw.

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included among the Spenserians a generation, or two, older than him. In his second collection (Sylvae), published when he was only eighteen, he had already become ‘Metaphysical’. The Mistress (1647), which contains many of his most famous love poems, appears to be a traditional post-Petrarchan cycle, in which a highborn lady spurns the love of the poet, who pleads with her, berates her for her resistance, but in the end is resigned to the never-ending nature of his suit. Commenting on Cowley’s unconvincing handling of the subject of love, Johnson wields one of his most stinging similes, saying that Cowley looked like a hermit or rhyming philosopher whose only knowledge of women is from hearsay. Donne is present in the subject matter, the strange, contorted metaphors6 and especially in particular stylistic features and the colloquial tone of his openings and interjections, much in the manner of ‘The Good Morrow’. His imitations, or Anacreontic paraphrases, display an eighteenth-century precision and wit. ‘Chronicle’, perhaps overrated by critics, is a lively ballad in which Cowley the poet pokes fun at himself, passing in review all the women he has loved and lost. ‘The Account’, along the same lines, reads like Leporello’s catalogue. The 1656 Poems was divided into four quite heterogeneous sections preceded by a preface (and followed by a hefty commentary) and constitutes practically the entire canon of Cowley’s work, with the exception of minor later additions. ‘Ode. Of Wit’7 is his most famous, and most quoted, poem, and is based on the essential characteristic of a, by now, dying poetics. It is, therefore, a metapoetic ode, and as such defines and displays the elusive, intangible nature of that ingredient which at first can only be described by contraries and exclusion – by what it is not: so, wit is not fleeting or aleatory; it is not some superficial fad, but a highly refined ability to impose order and discipline; it is not the typical Marlovian hyperbole, or the farfetched, startling metaphor. In short, it is the equivalent of the classical discordia concors, unity in variety, in other words the poetic faculty itself, seen as a the intellectual capacity for the dominion of mind over matter; 6 7

In ‘Resolved to Be Beloved’, the image of the compass needle that trembles before finding magnetic north, is taken from an emblem by Quarles (the fourth of Book V). Date unknown. In the form of an address to an unidentified person.

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or a kind of anti-conceit wit. Cowley’s great poem on the present, on the Civil War, was begun only in 1643, and for more than 300 years it was thought he had written only one book of it, until, in 1973, a second and then a third were discovered. The inspiration for Davideis came to him in prison in 1655. Like its model, the Aeneid, it was to comprise twelve books, of which only four were actually written. The allegorical framework is the confrontation between David and Saul, presenting Charles and Cromwell respectively. The opening scene of Lucifer in hell is Miltonic, like Crashaw’s analogous translation of Marino’s Strage degli innocenti (The Slaughter of the Innocents). Then the poem collapses, and Cowley wisely abandons it, perhaps aware of the contradiction between the subject matter and the poetic medium, the heroic couplet. The fifteen rhymed Pindaric odes celebrate both historical figures (mainly Hobbes) and abstract ideas like destiny, or light; there is even one dedicated to the Royal Society. Assigning dates to works is always problematical in Cowley’s case,8 but 1642 and 1649 saw the deaths of friend and fellow student William Hervey and of the poet Richard Crashaw; only to them did Cowley dedicate elegies that vibrate with feeling. The one he wrote for Crashaw is a masterpiece. ‘On the Death of Mr William Hervey’ opens with the grief felt by the poet on hearing of the death of his friend, and continues with a series of oppositions that are not Metaphysical but neoclassical. In his elegy ‘On the Death of Mr Crashaw’ the most theologically ingenious, but also most affectionate, part is the end, where Cowley, a fervent Anglican, apologizes for praising so highly someone who had left his (Cowley’s) ‘mother Church’: he states that there is no danger in heresy if there is also true devotion, as in Crashaw’s case; perhaps Crashaw was wrong, but his life was ‘in the right’. Cowley’s poems show the same leanings towards dematerialization as are found in Crashaw. § 24. Cleveland A graduate of Cambridge, where he became professor of rhetoric while still young, John Cleveland (1613–1658), historically the most ill-treated of 8

He himself says that the Pindaric odes were composed during a visit to Jersey in 1651 while on a mission on behalf of the queen.

§ 24. Cleveland

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the later Metaphysicals, is remembered as the author of an ‘undistinguished’ elegy dedicated to the Edward King immortalized by Milton in Lycidas, and a tribute contained in a volume in memory of Ben Jonson, Jonsonus Virbius.1 In 1642 he joined the royalist party and as a result was expelled from the university. He defended Charles with both the pen and the sword. He paid the price of his hostility to Cromwell, and disappeared without trace for ten years. We next see him in Norwich, hunted down and imprisoned; released after petitioning Cromwell, he died almost immediately after his release. Available figures point to his enormous popularity – more than twenty reprints of his poems, originally collected and published in 1647.2 He defended the king and attacked his Puritan enemies in violent, biting satires, some directed against specific, named targets; they are a far cry from the measured tones of Marvell’s later works, and can still be read with gusto today. As in Byron and Browning, as well as his near contemporary, Samuel Butler, the author of Hudibras, Cleveland abounds in neologisms taken from science and other fields hitherto ignored by poetry.3 Just as remarkable are his love poems, in which sexual allusion, though graceful, cannot hide a hint of cynicism, and, sometimes, misogyny. ‘Mark Anthony’ is a title that promises some serious historical work, but Cleveland, a master of the art of titling, manages to produce a new and unconventional reading of the well-worn theme of poet meets Venus in ‘a fragrant field with roses crowned’. Only a real poet could have written ‘Mark Anthony’, such is the metrical skill and variation seen here as in other works by Cleveland. But the tide soon turned and by the early years of the following century we find Dryden inveighing against what he scornfully calls ‘Clevelandisms’, by which he meant far-fetched conceits, and long, drawn-out exploits of wit. Take, for example, the image of the bee (reminiscent of Donne’s flea)

1 2

3

Volume 1, § 115.1 n. 4. Poetical Works, ed. J. E. Berdan, New Haven, CT and London 1911, today superseded by The Poems of John Cleveland, ed. B. Morris and E. Withington, Oxford 1967. Leaving aside those of uncertain authorship, Cleveland’s poems amount to a modest total of about 3,000 lines. The reader might be interested to know that words like ‘hydrography’ and ‘hemorrhoids’ appear in poetry for the first – and probably only – time in Cleveland.

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that buzzes about the arm of the fair Fuscara in the poem of that name, its flight a tour-de-force of apiary acrobatics mirrored in the language of the text. Because of these extravagances, Cleveland was considered the prime example of corruptio optimi pessima, representing the terminal stage of the degeneration of the conceit as used by Donne: the metaphor becomes self-referential and merely eccentric. Since Dryden, Cleveland’s reputation has never recovered, despite various attempts to rehabilitate him on the grounds of his influence on an admittedly small number of followers, and, in particular, because of his mastery of prosody. In extenuation, it might be said that he brings to his metaphors the same Baroque gusto, or the same bad taste, as Crashaw. He was not a Catholic, but was a target of the same accusation levelled at Crashaw, his contemporary, and, like him, the son of a curate and passionately anti-Cromwellian. In both are to be found clear traces of Marinism. § 25. Marvell* I: Cromwell’s regime. Justification and nostalgia The life of Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) is full of gaps, shadowy, poorly documented events and circumstances and, consequently, hearsay, riddles, 1

*

The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, 2 vols, Oxford 1927, 1952, and, revised by P. Legouis and E. E. Duncan-Jones, Oxford 1971; Andrew Marvell, ed. F. Kermode and K. Walker, Oxford 1990; Poems, ed. N. Smith, London 2003. Prose Works, ed. A. Patterson et al., 2 vols, New Haven, CT 2003. The 1921 essay by T. S. Eliot, ‘Andrew Marvell’, which started the revival and was considered the best modern appraisal, is included in ESE, 292–304; W. Empson’s ‘Marvell’s Garden’, in Some Versions of Pastoral, London 1935, 117–45, itself calls for interpretation, and is more referred to than actually read. A. Birrell, Andrew Marvell, London 1905; V. Sackville-West, Andrew Marvell, London 1929; M. C. Bradbrook and M. C. Lloyd Thomas, Andrew Marvell, Cambridge 1940; J. Leishman, Andrew Marvell, London 1958, and The Art of Marvell’s Poetry, London 1966 and 1968; J. Press, Andrew Marvell, London 1958; D. Davison, The Poetry of Andrew Marvell, London 1964; L. W. Hyman, Andrew Marvell, New York 1964; P. Legouis, Andrew Marvell, Poet, Puritan, Patriot, Oxford 1965 (1st French edn Paris and Oxford 1925); H. E. Toliver, Marvell’s Ironic Vision, New Haven, CT and London 1965; P. Gullì Pugliatti, Andrew Marvell, Bari 1968; Andrew Marvell: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. G. deF. Lord, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1968; J. M. Wallace, Destiny His Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell, Cambridge 1968; L. L. Martz, ‘Andrew Marvell: The Mind’s Happiness’, in The Wit

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suspicions, and, at the end, a juicy legal titbit. Like his life, Marvell’s work fascinates: he is without doubt one of the great English poets. His poems are at first sight simple, straightforward and clear, but a closer look reveals layers of often puzzling allusions that have for years led a number of critics to interpretations beyond the expected complexity of traditional poetic language, so that Marvell has become the benchmark of irresolvable poetic ambiguity, of systematic riddling and of absolutized deconstruction. These critics, inspired first by Empson and then by Derrida, have been accused by their more traditionalist colleagues of wanting to read into the poems complexities and conundrums that are present only in their minds, and are in no way justified by the text itself. Marvell’s poems were first published in 1681, three years after his death, with the title Miscellaneous Poems. Before that, little or nothing had appeared in print under his name. The person responsible for bringing about the publication was, curiously enough, a woman professing to be his widow, but who was in all likelihood his maid. At the time of his death, Marvell was known as the probable author of prose and verse satires and as the Member of Parliament for Hull. The foremost modern editor of Marvell, H. M. Margoliouth, has observed that it is to this self-styled Mary Palmer Marvell that we owe the survival of poems that of Love, Notre Dame, IN 1969, 151–90; A. E. Berthoff, The Resolved Soul: A Study of Marvell’s Major Poems, Princeton, NJ 1970; R. L. Colie, ‘My Echoing Song’: Andrew Marvell, Princeton, NJ 1970; D. F. Friedman, Marvell’s Pastoral Art, Berkeley, CA 1970; Tercentenary Essays in Honor of Andrew Marvell, ed. K. R. Friedenreich, Hamden, CT 1978; J. D. Hunt, Andrew Marvell: His Life and Writings, Ithaca, NY 1978; Approaches to Andrew Marvell: The York Tercentenary Essays, ed. C. A. Patrides, London 1978; A. Patterson, Marvell and the Civic Crown, Princeton, NJ 1978 (reprinted as Marvell: The Writer in Public Life, Harlow 1999), and Andrew Marvell, Plymouth 1994; CRHE, ed. E. Story Donno, London 1978; M. Craze, The Life and Lyrics of Andrew Marvell, London 1979; W. L. Chernaik, The Poet’s Time: Politics and Religion in the Work of Andrew Marvell, Cambridge 1983; Andrew Marvell: Modern Critical Views, ed. H. Bloom, New York 1989; C. Rees, The Judgment of Marvell, London 1989; T. Wheeler, Andrew Marvell Revisited, New York 1996; Andrew Marvell, ed. T. Healy, London 1998; N. Murray, Life Enough and Time: The Life of Andrew Marvell, London 1999; N. McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars: Marvell and the Cause of Wit, Oxford 2008; N. Smith, Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon, New Haven, CT 2010.

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might well have otherwise been lost forever, or been rediscovered by chance centuries later, as in the case of Traherne. The story of the maid who passes herself off as the widow on the strength of a secret marriage with the poet reads like something out of Wilkie Collins, and was, at first, discounted as pure fiction: was it not well known that Marvell was a confirmed bachelor? Later biographers, however, were less dismissive, and Empson himself swore by the authenticity of the ‘widow’s’ claim. The circumstances of Marvell’s death, too, are shrouded in mystery: the immediate cause of death was a neglected fever, but since until then he had always enjoyed excellent health, rumours spread that he had been poisoned by his enemies, identified by some as the Jesuits who had recruited him for a short time while a student, before he shook off their chains, becoming a fierce and lifelong adversary of the Catholic Church.1 2. The 1681 volume contained fifty-eight poems arranged in order perhaps by the author himself. Three of the most important poems were, however, removed before printing or expunged manually from the printed copies, because they touched on a sensitive subject involving a person considered controversial, especially after 1660. These three odes to Cromwell, reinstated in the canon more than 100 years later,2 remind us that Marvell is also, and for some, especially today, a public poet, militant and political, and even, it might be said, a defender of the regime, as is proved by his activity as a supporter of Cromwell and the Parliamentarians, and as an official of the Protectorate and member of Parliament for many years, both before and after the Restoration. Other poems show a clear distinction between the public and the private sphere, and between poems of topical interest on the one hand and others that go beyond the present and become timeless. A list would include dialogues between body and soul accompanied by other compositions that might be described as reflective, 1 2

The year before he died Marvell wrote another prose pamphlet attacking papistry and the ‘arbitrary government’ of Charles II. 1776, in three vols. Had he wished to, it would have been easy to find a publisher for his poems in London, where he resided during parliamentary sessions after 1660. He obviously considered his poetry a private pastime, though it must have circulated in manuscript, as was usual at the time. His ‘widow’ sold them to make money. A single copy of the 1681 edition (British Museum C. 59. i. 8) contained the three Cromwellian odes; a second edition including MS pages is the Bodleian MS Eng. Poet. D. 49.

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philosophical, dianoetic or dialectic; country house poems; in particular, rhapsodic poems on the world of nature in its flora and fauna, as seen in sub-groups of fantastical variations, like the short ‘mower’ series; above all, there are pseudo-traditional love poems on such well-worn post-Petrarchan themes as carpe diem. All the groups of poems listed above are homogeneous, although the dates of individual pieces are generally unknown. 1660 is a watershed year for Marvell as for England; for the poet, it is accompanied by a change of pace and a huge change of direction. Marvell was now officially a representative of the Opposition: he ceased to be the urbane love poet, and threw himself into the composition of satires in prose and verse, as befitted the scourge of the new regime of immorality and corruption that characterized Charles II’s court. 3. Given that ‘An Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell’s Return From Ireland’ refers to a specific fact that happened in 1650, it is natural to suppose it was written in the heat of the moment or shortly after. According to authoritative Marvell scholars, most of the poems date from 1650–1653, making this ode one of the first works of fundamental and central importance in the whole canon. Together with two other statements of principle – odes of political balance and historical assessment on important, symbolic occasions – it forms a natural triptych, and, with a few other additions, embodies the political and public sub-canon of the Cromwellian Puritan poet. The two other occasions I refer to are the anniversary of Cromwell’s appointment as Lord Protector and his death. Taken as a whole, the triptych reinforces a single political idea and vision of recent events, albeit with different nuances and perspectives. It has been pointed out, quite obviously, that in 1650 Marvell did not know Cromwell personally, and had only recently begun to lean towards the Parliamentarians and Puritans. The background to Marvell’s subsequent glorification of Cromwell is to be found in the previous twenty-nine years of the poet’s life. Born and raised in the port town of Hull, Marvell, like Crashaw, was the son of an Anglican minister with moderate Calvinist tendencies. This father figure looms large, and was to have an important retroactive effect on the son.3 It seems certain that Marvell, at the age of eighteen, while still a student at Cambridge, was 3

Marvell’s father died by drowning in the river in Hull, leading to a permanent aversion in the poet for all rivers.

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attracted to Catholicism, and may even have been converted by clandestine Jesuits. According to this version of events, he abandoned his studies and was only brought back to the Anglican fold thanks to the intervention of his father. His biographers tell us that Marvell had no regrets or remorse; he had no secret urge to become a Catholic, and felt shame and a desire for revenge as far as Catholics were concerned. After graduating and completing a grand tour from 1642 to 1646 in the retinue of a nobleman (the experience enabled him to master four languages)4 he entered the service of Lord Fairfax at Nun Appleton in Yorkshire in 1650, no doubt on the recommendation of some unknown benefactor. The three years spent as tutor to Fairfax’s twelve-year-old daughter were crucial to the development of his political ideas and his poetic inspiration. It was here that he began his ascent to ever more prestigious administrative positions. He was tutor to Cromwell’s future son-in-law, a colleague of Milton, whom he defended at his trial in 1660, in the Secretariat of the Commonwealth, and, finally, Member of Parliament for his native Hull. After 1660, he made peace with the government of the restored monarchy, and travelled to Russia, Denmark and Scandinavia as secretary to the British ambassador. During his three years at Nun Appleton, Marvell was in the employ of the commander in chief of the parliamentarian forces in the Civil War – Fairfax – at the very moment when he gave up his command in disagreement with the decision to undertake military action against the Scots. At Nun Appleton, Marvell was able to construct and develop his political vision while at the same time flirting platonically with his young pupil – in other words, living delicate, elusive emotional experiences that later gave rise to some of his most digressive and evanescent verse. He also worked out a philosophy and allegory of nature in the carefully tended gardens of Appleton House, and what was at that time untouched and remote countryside. 4. Marvell comes across as a Puritan poet and politician untainted by the prevailing, widespread fanaticism of the time; endowed with tolerance and intellectual balance, he could praise Cromwell without railing 4

In Rome he met the Catholic Irish poet, Richard Flecknoe, whom Dryden was to pillory in his satire against Shadwell (§ 51.3). Marvell himself wrote an equally ferocious attack on Flecknoe.

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at Charles I.5 To the dismay of those who came immediately after him, he was at first a royalist, then a supporter of the Protector, and after 1660 a critical voice within the apparatus of the restored monarchy. Like Cowley, he wanted to cover his back should the Stuarts regain power. This explains the caution and prudence – the balancing act, even – that impede the full flight of the 1650 panegyric. Speaking of Cowley, it should be said that Marvell’s ode is ‘Horatian’ but with something of the Pindaric odes of his predecessor; the adjective ‘Horatian’ suggests sober, controlled precision as against the overwhelming flow of emotion and imagery. Written in May 1650, it was, as I have said, expunged from all the copies of the 1681 edition, and was not restored until 1776. The ode consists of several stanzas with a innovative metrical form of four rhyming couplets of eight- and ten-syllable lines. The opening – ‘The forward youth that would appear’ – at once creates an impression of parody, even of satire, almost as if to suggest that Cromwell was moved purely by foolish, worldly ambition. A humanist, intellectually endowed, dedicated to the Muses, Cromwell has ceased to ‘languish’ in the ‘shade’ – terms indicating values dear to the classicist in Marvell, as we shall see – and has been summoned by the dramatic events unfolding to clean the rust from his arms. Marvell experiments a dichotomy on which he often has conflicting ideas: in other poems he states that it is useless to toil and fight for glory; here he makes an exception because circumstances demand it, and praises the man who prepares himself for action. A few stanzas later, he repeats that Cromwell would have preferred to cultivate the bergamot in his ‘private gardens’! At the same time, one senses an element of veiled criticism of his employer, Fairfax, who had done just the opposite, removing his armour and withdrawing from action in the field. Cromwell’s entry in the fray is described in the same terms as the rapture imagined – or urged upon the lovers – in ‘To His Coy Mistress’: a wild tearing and destruction, smoke and fire. There is something orgasmic about it. He is possessed by the fierce flame of ‘angry Heaven’. The reference to Caesar (and, therefore, Brutus) creates a link between Cromwell and those who were ‘forced’ to commit regicide, for self-defence, as it were. 5

The famous disagreement between Cleanth Brooks and Douglas Bush over Marvell’s position as regards Cromwell rumbled on from 1947 to 1952.

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A note of caution is introduced with the allegorical figures of Justice and Fate debating briefly the claims of those who wish to preserve the ‘ancient rights’ of monarchy. With a ‘metaphysical’ appeal to horror vacui and the law that states that two bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time, Marvell pronounces his verdict: Cromwell is justified in removing the king, adding that only the strong must lead the nation. The trap that Cromwell has laid to capture the king and charge him with manifest untrustworthiness is a double-edged sword: the scene of the execution is presented in flashes, a performance of some surreal tragedy by a spectator – Charles at the court masques – who has become the leading actor in the play, applauded by the clapping of ‘bloody hands’. It is tempting to see an allusion to Macbeth here. Marvell chooses to go against the expectations of the mob. Charles is portrayed as no trembling coward: his demeanour is noble when he lowers his head, as on a pillow, in order to receive ‘the axe’s edge’. The subject announced in the title appears only half way through the ode, with the Irish tamed and forced to acknowledge Cromwell’s magnanimity and justice; Marvell reminds himself and the reader that Cromwell has not become proud but is ‘still in the republic’s hand’,6 and is therefore at its service. The tone becomes openly triumphant only in the last twenty of the 120 lines, when it asserts that Cromwell will be not only ruthless towards the Scots and the other British rebels, but that he will spur the other European nations forward in their fight for freedom. It is difficult to think of anything more Machiavellian, even pre-Darwinian, than the ending of the ode: he who has taken power by force, must hold on to it by force; might is right. The other two Cromwellian odes are preceded or accompanied by Latin mottos and epigrams to the effect that Cromwell is the hand that carries out the orders of a people born to be free. The ode on the first anniversary of Cromwell’s appointment as Protector expresses the wish that he will become king, possessed of boundless energy as he is, while the rest of the world sinks into lethargy. Cromwell is lightning, like

6

The simile of the falcon which, after causing havoc in the sky, lands on a bough and is under the complete control of the falconer reinforces the idea that Cromwell is still a tool of the republic.

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Napoleon for Manzoni.7 At lightning speed he has built a new constitution, as Amphion with his magic lute laid the bricks for the walls of Thebes. Marvell, too, falls prey to the mirage of the ‘Fifth Monarchy’, a sect that saw in Cromwell a prophet of Christ who would usher in the new millennium.8 The third ode, on Cromwell’s death, greets his son, Richard, as his heir; the republican regime has been strengthened by the desired creation of a dynasty. 5. ‘Upon Appleton House’ occupies a special place in the Marvell canon for the following reasons: it is long – at almost 100 stanzas it is his longest work with the exception of the political satires; it is part private, part public, and as such is a trait d’union between the political poet and the contemplative, pastoral, erotic and nature poet, coordinating the relative antinomies; and, finally, because its diction is anti-Marvellian, repudiating Horace and the terse sobriety of the Cromwellian ode, and, at the same time, contradicting the absolute Apollonian sharpness of outline which is the poet’s defining stylistic trait. A kind of stream of consciousness ante litteram takes the form here of a syntax which is often approximate, halting, and jerky, giving the impression of something deliberately sloppy. The fruit of the three years Marvell lived there as tutor to Fairfax’s daughter, it presents in a loose structure both scenes of contemporary life and a little of the history of the priory which became the residence of the former general. All internal order disappears in a weave of episodes that flash upon the reader like memories of a dream or trance, a series of amazing overlapping visions, past and present in counterpoint, a kaleidoscope of shimmering, colourful images. The description of the history and the everyday life of Appleton House, albeit realistic, responds to symbolic, ritualistic rhythms, sometimes anagogic and typological; reality on the one hand becomes more rarefied, on the other becomes once more the solid, contemporary England of 1650. Some symbolic components of the poet’s mental and allusive geography are recurrent, like the pastoral peace of the garden, withdrawal in solitude as opposed to joining the fray, the joyful mowing of the grass and its unexpected aftermath, and the arrival 7 8

Or ‘demonic’, like Napoleon for Goethe (Leishman 1968, 13). § 1.6.

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of a tutelary goddess who will ensure the continuation of the line. Since the house was a former convent, Marvell remarks that those bars segregated the nuns from the world in an unnatural fashion. Fairfax’s ancestor had kidnapped his bride-to-be from the convent to reunite her with the world outside and its pleasures. The deconsecrating of the convent had been decreed by the just king, Henry VIII. Using a technique of dissolving visual planes, Marvell overlaps the mowing with the biblical story of the crossing of the Red Sea, then conflates this episode with the mower who massacres a rail hiding in the grass, but immediately regrets having done so. The reader familiar with Marvell automatically links this event with the killing of a fawn in a poem to be discussed later. The reference here is to the generalized violence of the seventeenth-century world: the killing of this bird (a forerunner of Coleridge’s albatross?) weighs so little on the conscience of the mower that his first thought is to cook and eat it. On the other hand, Marvell may be commenting on the mad innocence of a re-Edenized world. As always in Marvell, poles may be inverted: a primary value may become secondary; history will decide. Everything is relative.9 The game of evocation continues: the newly mown field, cleansed of the old yellow grass, evokes the Levellers. The narrator finally enters a kind of Noah’s Ark. The ode uses a photographic technique of the negative: it is as if Appleton House was an upside down world, a photographic negative – or, rather, as if the world outside were in the negative. This peculiar vision is reinforced by the reference to man as an inverted tree. The final stanza is surprising in its eccentricity: the salmon fishers, like Antipodean creatures, ‘have shod their Heads in their Canoos’. T. S. Eliot thought this image a Baroque extravagance that undermined Marvell’s ‘reasonableness’. 6. As might be expected, after 1660 Marvell wrote only scathing satires against the restored Stuart regime, aware that the country had gone back to the status quo, that Cromwell had not completed the regeneration of England, and that the longed-for palingenesis was left half done. ‘Last Instructions to a Painter’ (1667), written after the Dutch fleet sailed into 9

It is significant that in the first Cromwellian ode the bloody head of the king is presented as auspicious on the basis of Roman mythology and superstition, while here, in stanza 50, this ‘flesh untimely mow’d’ bodes ill.

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the river Medway, leading to the impeachment of the Lord Chancellor and his escape to France, is a blistering attack on influential members of the court, using a stratagem first found in Busenello and borrowed by the poet Edmund Waller. The prose pamphlet, ‘The Rehearsal Transprosed’ (1672–1673), targets Bishop Samuel Parker and argues the case for freedom of speech and conscience. These and other works were published anonymously and were attributed to Marvell, not always with general consent. § 26. Marvell II: Return to Eden The political odes and the various poems addressed to public figures on special occasions are, in general, quite long – sometimes hundreds of lines – and are usually in rhymed couplets. Marvell’s other poems are stanzaic, quite short, and terse. Though modern criticism, immersed in the political side of the poet, is, generally speaking, intent on dissecting the former, Marvell’s basic canon remains the one proposed, with excessive severity, by T. S. Eliot, consisting of one or two poems that are among the highest expressions of English poetry of all time. Apart from these, says Eliot, Marvell must be considered a minor poet. It is difficult to place Marvell in the context of seventeenth-century literature because he is a diachronic poet, as well as being, above all, synchronic. At one time, reading Marvell meant reconstructing his literary network – the allusions to and borrowings from texts he had read and that ‘buzzed in his ears’ as he wrote.10 Such investigations show that Marvell is less innovative, and prove that he was above all a supreme ‘arranger’. By the middle of the century, the Metaphysical mode was dying if not dead. Marvell resuscitated it and in doing so wrote some of his best later work. His contemporary, Cowley, took a different direction, towards a ‘metaphysicism’ that is dry, empty, cold and based on logic and mathematics. Marvell is also compared to Crashaw in his rare inability to keep his wit under the control of his classical ‘reasonableness’. Defining him ‘Cavalier’ means basing this judgement on the premise that metaphysicism is classically controlled, like a mixture of the best of Herrick with the best of Jonson. Eliot also reminds his readers that 10

Leishman carries out this kind of meticulous analysis in his, by now outdated critique published in 1968.

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Marvell was raised on the classics, and on Horace in particular, and that he became the most measured, economical and laconic of poets, more so than even Donne. The process of gradual draining of the poetic text begins in Marvell with the choice of his favourite metre, the octosyllabic verse; the poetic discourse is proportionally contracted in brachylogy, ellipses, and omissions of links in an argument. His objective seems to be to use the fewest words and phrases possible. He is therefore the paratactic poet par excellence, whose poems contain not an ounce of waste or ornament; what we have is pure essence.11 Each line has few words, and his entire poetic vocabulary has relatively few words because the number of monosyllables – usually high in English poetry as is obvious – is low in Marvell, while two- and three-syllable words, and those of Latin origin, are more frequent. The semantic fall-out is greater in words of Latin origin and often provokes a chain reaction of meanings. Marvell is an adjectival poet in the sense that he prefers to link a substantive with an adjective, which, with its own semantic range, extends the field of resonance of the noun, often through incongruous, enigmatic or provocative associations, as in the case of ‘curious’ or ‘vegetable’, which even a historical dictionary cannot completely illuminate. The highest examples of Marvell’s poetic art consist of a thought that is born, discussed and concluded, or a confrontation or clash between polar positions in the form of dialogues, ending sharply after a brief development. When Marvell stretches out, or simply tells a story, he is not infallible: even the delirious complaint of the nymph whose fawn has been killed is disappointingly unconvincing. 2. Marvell’s laconic style, it should be remembered, is reinforced by the fact that his is a poetry that stands alone, without manifestos or authorial declarations of intent – in short, without any kind of paratext. Marvell’s letters are extant and may be consulted, but they are purely factual and addressed to his Hull constituents. The suspension of sense is, however, a mainly internal factor and involves consolidated artistic strategies. The

11

However, Leishman 1968, 289 and passim, deplores the ‘irritating’ habit of the emphatic use of the verb ‘to do’ and redundant words purely for rhyme, which makes Marvell sound paradoxically amateurish at times.

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external author splits into a succession of voices, as in a dramatic monologue, and the ideas put forward by one conflict with those of the others. The technique is typical of twentieth-century verse. In ‘A Dialogue between the Soul and Body’, the soul uses the same argument to reject the advances of the body as the lover in ‘To His Coy Mistress’ puts forward to tempt his mistress to sexual pleasure: time flies. Marvell is a dramatic poet, or at least a dialogic one; the voices of his poems are not his own but belong to the dramatis personae, like that of the nymph with the fawn. In the pastoral context, not all his female figures are retiring and plaintive like this nymph; the shepherds are often victims of proud, ‘cutting’ women, symbolized by the sickle or scythe. Indeed, ‘The Garden’ is a response to ‘To His Coy Mistress’, since, after ‘the heat of passion’, nothing remains but to withdraw into the country and look forward to another form of panic fusion. Nature, in ‘The Garden’, is yielding, spontaneously rewarding, and the narrating voice sounds less impersonal than usual, and more passionate. Is a synthesis possible? Can Marvell’s Weltanschauung be reconstructed? To answer requires an evaluation of the two original opposing vectors, the Platonic and the Pauline, of the body and the soul. Quietly and humbly, the soul parries the attacks of the body, and God approves. However, hostilities break out on other fronts and the result hangs in the balance. Eros is frustrating and Marvell describes it as condemned to unfulfilment, especially in ‘The Definition of Love’. In other poems, however, like his most famous one, the body argues its way through to victory, not so much over the soul itself, as over a virginity that wishes to remain chaste in the face of assaults carried out on pragmatic or non-masochistic grounds, given that denial imposed by an inhuman religion is too hard to bear. ‘The Garden’ chooses an alternative fusion, no longer erotic, between man and nature, the dissolution of man in nature, a theme that will intrigue the Neo-Apocalyptics of the twentieth century, like Ted Hughes and Dylan Thomas. 3. In a general sense Marvell looks back with nostalgia to Eden and pre-lapsarian innocence, perhaps before Eros existed, when desire was unknown and procreation asexual. The dewdrop longs to return to where it came from, afraid it will be sullied (‘On a Drop of Dew’); Christ is called upon to crush the serpent again (‘The Coronet’). Marvell goes further than any other pre-lapsarian because he envies the solitary Adam, before

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Eve was given to him as his partner. Edenic solitude is ‘two Paradises in one’. He captures and describes ipso facto the post-lapsarian state – raging passions and the rule of discord. This world after the Fall sees the rise of a Hobbesian – and Machiavellian – urge that takes the concrete form of a thirst for power, otherwise expressed as homo homini lupus. What remedies are possible? Exile in unspoilt paradises like the Bermudas is an extreme option that must be put to the test: will not the same passions one is escaping from raise their head there? Within the status quo the most feasible palingenesis is Cromwell’s Commonwealth. Such is the messianic meaning of the lines from the ‘Horatian Ode’, ‘And cast the kingdom old / Into another mould’. Alternatively, a possible surrogate is the child’s innocence as found in Traherne, or the nymph that finds fulfilment in the love for her fawn, only to be brutally awoken from her trance. The world governed and devoured by Eros is transmitted mimetically in the language that reflects it in the form of Freudian slips or anagrams.12 4. As I mentioned, Marvell’s corpus, excluding the political odes and the satires, can be divided into areas and subgenres, and discussion of them limited to this criterion. Such a division, however, does not reveal any common thread, so that we are forced to conclude that Marvell is a changeable, moody, inconsistent or simply contradictory poet who says opposing things in poems in different moments of his development, or even more or less at the same time. A chronological reading is impossible, and would in any case be brief, so little do we know of Marvell’s life and thoughts. Certain background events are clear, but a complete psychological picture is lacking. For example, though he grew up in Hull, Marvell never speaks of the port and the sea. The short dramatic monologue of the nymph13 wavers between the naïf and Romantic-Victorian pathos, and exudes a strange airiness foreshadowing the atmospheres of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande: the justice that in ‘Cromwell’ fought with Fate over the head of the king now demands that animals too should be killed with justice. Within ‘A

12 13

The word ‘coitus’ can be anagrammed from ‘To His Coy Mistress’; ‘quaint’ is seen to echo ‘queynte’, a medieval word for the female genital organ. ‘A Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Faun’.

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Dialogue Between The Resolved Soul and Created Pleasure’ lies a much debated theological problem: does nature lead to God, is it a means for man to achieve sainthood? Or is it, instead, an evil source of distraction, indeed, of sin? As in a poem by Herbert, Pleasure invites the soul to feast at nature’s banquet, provoking the reply that the real banquet is held in heaven. The resulting opposition hinges on the choice between stretching out on the soft grass of this earth, and the peacefulness of a mind intent on God and duty. Each temptation by Pleasure is overturned by the soul – taken and transferred on to a level of sublimation and renunciation. At the same time, Pleasure tempts in quatrains and sestets, while the soul replies more roundly in couplets. Analogies with the temptation of Christ in the desert become more explicit when Pleasure adds, inviting: ‘thou shalt know the hidden cause, / And see the future time: / Try what depth the centre draws; / And then to heaven climb’, to which the soul responds that the way to heaven lies not through knowledge but through humility. It is possible to see here a parody of the seven deadly sins that besiege man, who is free to resist or give in. The soul is anxious to ascend to heaven, and answers the lengthy speeches of the tempter with two short lines. Both soul and body are aware of how fleeting time is. Marvell usually writes and re-writes what he has written. ‘A Dialogue Between the Soul and Body’ is one of these re-writings, in which neither side wins: the soul denounces the body’s yoke and the body the tyranny of the soul; the poet, or narrator, is silent, offering no word of explanation or guidance. ‘The Mower to the Glow Worms’ and the other ‘mower’ poems are problematized eclogues thick with biblical reminiscences, disagreements, dark visions of the Fall and lost innocence. In the first of the series, the stanzas address the glow-worms with a Shelleyan list of characteristics, effects and functions. The glow-worms have guided the lady to the tryst, but the man loses his way. In ‘The Mower’s Song’, in five six-line stanzas that suggest the circular movement of the scythe and close with a bitter refrain, the mower is metaphorically mown down by his ungrateful lover. Marvell introduces an unidentifiable Juliana, a type of the cruel woman already with touches of Keats’s belle dame sans merci. Love is experienced above all in what is, at times, its only aspect – frustration, and fulfilment suspended or delayed. ‘Mower against Gardens’ is an attack on lust, which defiles the innocence of the first garden, turning it into a brothel.

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The obsession with mowing, not only grass but also, inadvertently, human beings, or of chopping down, is obviously mixed, in Marvell’s imagination, with the bloody horrors of the Civil War and the death of the king. 5. ‘To His Coy Mistress’ is a ‘Metaphysical’ poem, and, more precisely, a Donnian one, in so far as it is based on a three-stage argument: 1) a hypothesis put forward but not accepted; 2) a denial of the hypothesis; 3) a suggested, operative solution. The first phase of the argument states at length what is impossible for the two lovers, given the limits of time and space that obtain in the post-lapsarian world. Courtship is extended to paradoxical and hyperbolic extremes, as suggested by the references to the Last Judgement and the conversion of the Jews – the last things. Then the narrating voice tries to imagine the huge stretches of time in which – in this hypothesis, time is slowed down – he could praise the various parts of the woman’s body. The second part of his appeal is the awareness of the passing of time. For the first time the materialistic, sensual narrator calls into question the attractiveness of eternal life. Eternity is bare, desolate, empty, and monotonous – ‘deserts of vast eternity’ where, unlike what Herbert of Cherbury believed, love does not last, and beauty fades. Love, far from surviving, will turn to dust. Marvell’s materialistic cynicism, or dark humour, is on a par with, if not superior to, that of Donne in his two funeral poems: ‘The grave’s a fine and private place, / But none, I think, do there embrace’,14 where phallic worms penetrate with ease the woman’s much defended virginity. The third phase is the moment of decisions, not based on vague idealization. While youth lasts, it is important to gather the flower of love; the idea is driven home by a daring image of wild beasts tearing at life through the bars of their cage. Sexual enjoyment should be wild and violent (see the verbs ‘devour’ and ‘tear’ and the adjective ‘rough’). Softness must merge with force, as suggested by the strange metaphor of the ‘ball’ at the end of the poem. 6. The other two most famous poems by Marvell, though at first sight very different, are linked by the intuition of a natural world where the innocence and abundance of Eden have been restored. In ‘Bermudas’ God

14

‘Embrace’ is clearly a euphemism, possibly influenced by the French ‘s’embrasser’.

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guides the Puritan pilgrims to ‘an isle so long unknown’, ‘kinder’ and more tolerant and generous than the one they have left.15 The centre of the poem is the expectation of a friendly, bountiful Nature, where the birds make daily visits, the trees give fruit in greater abundance than anywhere in the old world: figs, melons, pineapples, limes – all erotic fruits, all round and plump. Another exotic product they have access to with almost miraculous ease, given the difficulty of extraction, is ambergris, which comes from deep inside the sperm whale.16 Of course, in its magical simplicity, ‘Bermudas’ teems with more or less disguised references to the Scriptures. Base appetites will find no satisfaction in these islands, which house a temple already built in which to sing the praises of the Lord. Marvell fires a parting shot at the end of the poem: the songs of praise must rebound from the vault of Heaven and echo in the Gulf of Mexico as a challenge to the Papist colonizers there.17 ‘The Garden’18 invokes a purifying contact with nature and a sublimation – one might say transubstantiation – of the erotic instinct, bearing in mind that the gods, too, ended their pursuit of a beautiful nymph by turning her into some kind of plant prior to ravishing her. This is the poem that most clearly expresses Marvell’s desire to withdraw from the world and to take refuge in the peace of the senses and of the mind. In line 9 he addresses the personification of Quiet, which is not to be found in the busy haunts of men, but in the country. The allurements of women, represented by the colours red and white, give way to green, symbolizing nature. Lovers carve their names on the barks of trees, but do not realize that female beauty is far inferior to that of the natural world. Finally, sexual abstinence is praised in favour of the pleasure deriving from 15 16 17

18

These striking details were probably taken from the account of a British traveller to Bermuda with whom Marvell had stayed in 1653. On the debt to Waller see § 27.3. The trembling of the Bermuda islands on the ‘bosom’ of the ocean makes them look vaguely like nipples. Two hundred and fifty years later this pattern was to be used, and inverted, by Hopkins when he commemorated in ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ a different exile, that of five German nuns, expelled from Germany because Catholic. Even clearer echoes are found in ‘Heaven-Haven’, where the nun who takes the veil emigrates to a place where there are no snowstorms or hailstorms, but, as in Marvell, an ‘eternal spring’. A Latin version, Hortus, is earlier.

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a union with nature: lines 47 and 48, as famous and proverbial as some of Shakespeare’s couplets, synthesize the essence of Marvell in the wished for annihilation of ‘all that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade’. The description of the garden leads to the deposing of erotic love and the beginning of vegetable love. In ever more fable-like tones, Marvell transforms it into an exotic Eden, with an obvious allusion to the tropical world of ‘Bermudas’. In a kind of hallucination, fruits fall like manna or hang from the trees like the pineapples, melons and vines. But, as in ‘Bermudas’, the pleasures of this paradise are not only sensual and gastronomic, but, and above all, spiritual, and pertain to the mind as a creative, productive and synthesizing force. As in the philosophy of Bruno and Schelling, the soul is naturized and nature animized, turning into a bird poised for flight. Marvell states explicitly that this was Adam’s state before Eve, suggesting that perhaps Adam did not really need a helpmate. In this Eden, a wise gardener has made a sun dial of herbs and flowers – a new, alternative way of measuring time. § 27. Waller To call him ‘immoral’ is putting it lightly. Edmund Waller (1606–1687) combined flagrant, flamboyant political opportunism with a degree of self-possession that permitted him to ride the waves of the stormy midseventeenth century. Born into a wealthy family, highly articulate, destined from an early age to a parliamentary career, Waller was not a full time poet; indeed he was not particularly prolific (though he was precocious), and judging from the small number of his works, he must have spent a large part of his sixty-year career without putting pen to paper. Cromwell was a distant relative, so naturally his first political leanings were towards the Parliamentarians. However, by 1642 he had already gone over to the other side, and later dedicated to the queen his volume of poems, which had been circulating in MS for some time, and had been set to music by William Lawes. A great number of these were panegyrics, complimentary verses, and other forms of flattery peculiar to the career-minded courtier. Waller made his mark in history by organizing and leading the royalist plot that bears his name, the purpose of which was to liberate London and make it the stronghold of the king. Waller was arrested, but saved his skin by

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revealing the names of his accomplices. Bailed out for a huge amount, he went to the queen’s court in exile in Paris, where he held a salon by selling off the jewels of his second wife. He was pardoned, and returned to England, where he duly adulated Cromwell in a panegyric which, as far as contents and political stance are concerned, is very similar to that of Marvell, except that Waller’s praise of the dictator is even more fulsome. His volume of poems was added to after the Restoration when, with yet another change of loyalty, Waller began to sing the praises of the new king, who, however, was offended by receiving less exaggerated applause than Cromwell. Waller got out of the embarrassing situation thanks to an excellent quip. Charles II was celebrated by Waller as a practical, down to earth monarch, who repaired crumbling buildings, re-ordered the parks, and embellished nature. Right up to his death, he livened up the sessions of Parliament with his brand of sparkling humour with which he hailed the new-found tolerance. 2. His epitaph salutes him as a facile princeps among contemporary poets, a sign of how much he was read, respected and even imitated. Shortly after, Dryden was to acknowledge him publicly as the poet who had restored excellence and dignity to English verse; Pope identified the defining character of his poetry in smoothness; and Johnson included him in his Lives. Waller is the father, or at least the first famous practitioner of the heroic couplet, which was to become the standard form of Augustan poetry (though he was preceded by the translators George Sandys [1578–1644], with his Ovid, and Edward Fairfax [1580?–1635],1 with his Tasso). With him seventeenth-century wit practically dies; the attention of the poet shifts to grace, precision and fluency. Carew might have competed with Waller, but to do so he would have needed the forty more years of life that Waller was lucky enough to enjoy. He is, therefore, the trait d’union in an arc that spans nearly 100 years, his birth symptomatically coinciding with the performances of Shakespeare’s penultimate plays, and his death with 1

Half-brother to Thomas Fairfax of Appleton House (translator of Solitude by Saint Amant), where Marvell was a tutor (§ 25.3). It is odd that critics do not include among the pioneers of this verse form the name of Cleveland (§ 24), whose famous elegy on Edward King is in heroic couplets.

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the first literary steps of Dryden and Pope. He first came to the attention of the public with an ode dedicated to Prince Charles’s escape from shipwreck near Santander, in which he already displayed a mastery of the heroic couplet. The most significant poems of the collection are those addressed to Sacharissa, the far from promising name of an idealization of a young descendant of Sir Philip Sidney. This cruel beauty spurned Waller and married a lord instead. The beautiful ‘Go Lovely Rose’ is an admonitory poem on the transience of life addressed to his reluctant lover; another famous one, ‘On a Girdle’, tells of the fetish of a girdle that once surrounded the slim waist of the loved one. In reality the book is something of a hotchpotch, the love poems punctuated by various kinds of occasional compositions, proving once more that poetry for Waller is not the solemn celebration of heroic deeds; instead, he seeks out and sings of the trivial and curious, and makes the insignificant meaningful. When he praises the king, it is because he has repaired St Paul’s Cathedral, or improved a park, and the queen is extolled for popularizing the taking of tea. Waller’s historical merits proved insufficient to guarantee a lasting fame, and the Romantics dismissed him for being bereft of true passion. Waller remains a marginal poet, largely unread, seldom reprinted, and, on the whole, ignored, save by a restricted number of specialists.2 3. However, the time has come, perhaps, to reconsider this poet – according to common opinion, intellectually not very challenging, and acknowledged as being ‘a skilful versifier’,3 readable, though somewhat obtuse – who belongs to the category of English poets loved by the undiscriminating. To begin with, curiously enough, Waller and Marvell seem to be almost a duo. Leishman put together quite a collection of borrowings and links between the two, suggesting that the more one reads Waller the clearer it becomes that Marvell perfects and polishes what Waller only hints at, and sometimes echoes him explicitly. For example, Waller writes of Apollo chasing Daphne, and describes the nymph transformed into a laurel bush, just as in ‘The Garden’. The adjective, ‘coy’, too, recurs, with 2 3

The poetic works are collected in the two volumes of Poems, ed. G. Thorn Drury, London 1903. PSL, 262.

§ 28. Denham

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a closing coup de théâtre of the god left grasping only laurel leaves in his hand. Sacharissa’s realm is a very Edenic garden; in the same poem, there is a reference to the myth of Amphion, with the same words and details as in Marvell’s second Cromwell ode. ‘To Phyllis’ reads like a rough draft of ‘To His Coy Mistress’. One of the possible sources of ‘Bermudas’ is Waller’s ‘Battle of the Summer Islands’, a short, highly enjoyable, mock-heroic poem about the capture of two whales, which contains a similar list of exotic fruits and plants found in these tropical islands. With ‘Instructions to a Painter’ Waller provided Marvell with a suggestive framework for satire. Finally, in his ‘Envoi’, Ezra Pound seems to parody Waller’s song ‘Go Lovely Rose’.4 Pound recognized that Waller was moved by special ‘elevating’ inspiration when he wrote for music, and pronounced him to be a good poet at a time when the two arts were not yet dissociated, unlike in the days of stolid Mauberley. § 28. Denham Born in Dublin, of an Irish mother and an English father, who was Lord Chief Baron of the Irish Exchequer, John Denham (1615–1669) studied law at Lincoln’s Inn. He became known as a valiant translator of Virgil and all-round classicist, as well as the author of an exotic play which was performed in record time, in 1641, just before the theatres were closed. During the Civil War, he worked for the king’s cause by bearing coded messages to his supporters. When this secret activity was discovered by the Parliamentarians he was forced, like so many others, to take refuge in France. On his return to England after the Restoration, he was rewarded by being appointed Surveyor of the King’s Works. Denham had no qualifications for the post, which was practically that of an architect, so he was at first flanked and then replaced by Christopher Wren. A member of Parliament and of the Royal Society, in his later years he suffered briefly from dementia, perhaps owing to his wife’s affair with a duke. With Waller, he formed an avant-garde of Augustan classicism; the two were later joined by Cowley. One of the very few unrhymed poems by Denham (excluding imitations, 4

Cf. H. Witemeyer, The Poetry of Ezra Pound, Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles 1969, 190–5, for comments on various claims contained in The ABC of Reading.

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paraphrases and translations)1 is an ode to Cowley, who is represented as standing on the very peak of English poetry. Denham is also credited with the sensational discovery of Milton’s Paradise Lost. 2. Denham’s use of the rhymed couplet begins with the translation, or rather, paraphrase, of the first six books of the Aeneid, the last of the many English translations to appear since the fifteenth century. Later, he tried his hand at translating the Psalms. The first edition of Cooper’s Hill was published in 1643, and was an instant success. Nowadays it is the only poem by Denham that is still remembered, especially the 1655 edition, which contains the addition of two couplets on the stately flowing of the River Thames. The panorama of places and sights celebrates the cultural, political, and literary civilization of England. The places revisited evoke associations and memories and reinforce the patriotic spirit; ancient myths are re-enacted, past and present mingle in the account of the king’s stag hunt, which fades into the historical event of the ‘Magna Carta’ wrested by the barons from King John and still fraught with meaning. Cooper’s Hill established what was to become a popular poetic genre, the topographical or ‘loco-descriptive’ poem (Dr Johnson called it ‘local poetry’), taken up by Pope and Prior and much favoured up to the time of Wordsworth. The solemn, even tone, though verging on the monotonous, caused Dryden to exclaim in wonder that Denham’s majestic style could be taken as the paragon of fine writing. The description of the Thames flowing deep and clear, ‘strong without rage / Without o’er flowing full’, became a metaphor of eighteenth-century poetry and prose. Such high esteem did not last, despite the pre-Romantic frisson of the union between man and a humanized nature and a foreshadowing of Ruskin’s ‘pathetic fallacy’. After the Augustan period, Denham was considered careless, slipshod, morally solid but lacking in imagination, and poetically inferior to Waller. § 29. The homilists. Andrewes, Taylor The lasting fame of the homilists and divines of the seventeenth century, unchanged throughout the years, is due largely to the influence of what

1

Poetical works, ed. T. H. Banks, New Haven, CT and London 1928.

§ 29. The homilists. Andrewes, Taylor

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might loosely be called Puritanism on the religious beliefs and practices of the English. The Puritans put the sermon at the centre of the religious service once the trappings of Catholicism and Anglo-Catholicism had been abolished, leaving the way for the Scriptures as the only valid mediation between man and God and the foundation of the religious life. The divines chosen here for analysis are two from a large number of religious figures (bishops, curates or Anglican monks, and authors of both sacred and secular works) some of whom have already been dealt with, or at least mentioned, insofar as connected with some important writer, or because they possess the polyvalence typical of seventeenth-century England, like Joseph Hall, Donne, Herbert or Nicholas Ferrar. Archbishop Laud, who tried to impose a single Anglican liturgy during the reign of Charles I, and failed catastrophically, left nothing that has survived in print. Yet, for the historian, the problem posed by seventeenth-century homiletic literature, or polemical or theological tracts, is the ever-shifting boundary between the propagandistic and the purely literary use of words. Seventeenth-century homilist literature was read for centuries for edification and at the same time as literature, and until recently its cultural relevance was palpable: for example the detailed analysis and description of the works of Jeremy Taylor to be found in the early handbooks of English literary history are witness to a culture that had different values compared to those of today. The rise of secularism and laicism has eliminated one of the reasons for including homilies ex officio in the count of literary genres; or at least, the sermon has been shifted so far down the literary table as to disappear entirely, resurfacing only in textbooks of ecclesiological history. 2. Lancelot Andrewes (1555–1626), the favourite chaplain of the queen, one of the translators of the Authorized Version (as we shall see), holder of three prestigious bishoprics, and a pious man mourned in elegies by Milton and Crashaw,1 shot suddenly from anonymity to fame in 1926 thanks to an essay in which T. S. Eliot2 cited him as an example of the unification of sensibility and intellect, the chief characteristic of the great period of 1 2

A volume of private devotions, written in Greek and translated into Latin with the title of Preces privatae, was translated into English in 1647. ‘Lancelot Andrewes’, in ESE, 341–53.

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Elizabethan and Jacobean literature. Andrewes, said Eliot, was even more endowed with ‘unified sensibility’ than Donne himself. Eliot was intrigued by Andrewes’s idiosyncratic, staccato style of writing – Evelyn the diarist notes that he was famous for ‘crumbling his text’ and Eliot himself observed that ‘no one is more master of the short sentence than Andrewes’. Andrewes adopted a curious procedure that entailed successive reformulations of the same concept, as if he wanted to squeeze out all the meaning hidden in every biblical verse. Of the ninety-six sermons, published posthumously in 1627, Eliot singled out those of Christmas and Easter, and was to insert fragments from them into his poems. The homilies should be read bearing in mind that they were intended not for the public at large, but for the elite audience of the Jacobean court. Andrewes was said to have been as accomplished a speaker as he was a writer, but disastrously inept in questions concerning ecclesiastical policy. The formula of a sermon by Andrewes is similar to one by Donne: a biblical quotation is followed by a subtle analysis of the text aimed at bringing to light hidden meanings verging on the paradoxical. Pedantic, precise, he dissects the text like a modern day hermeneutist who counts syllables and sounds, analyses syntax and syntagmas, and constructs tables of discourse functions. The praxes of explication de texte are anticipated by the recurrent use of enumeration, schematization and identification. This means that – euphemistically speaking – if an Andrewes rhetoric does exist, it pertains to ‘ethos’ rather than ‘pathos’: the emotional effect is nil. 3. The title of stella predicantium belongs, in reality, not to Andrewes, to whom it was awarded, but to Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667). Son of a lowly barber, ‘spotted’ by Laud, the successor of Donne as preacher in St Paul’s, by the age of twenty-five he was chaplain of the royal army. His ecclesiastical career was interrupted by the Civil War and the Protectorate. At the return of the monarchy, he received from Charles II the unwelcome gift of a bishopric in Ireland, which he held until his death. It is obvious at first reading that, as a homilist, Taylor is the diametrical opposite of Andrewes: his style is rich and imaginative; he writes with joy and fantasy, like Spenser and Shakespeare, to whom he has, indeed, been likened, or Daniello Bartoli, to mention a Catholic equivalent. Andrewes’s strict logic is replaced by observation of life in order to find out objective correlatives. He was idolized

§ 30. The ‘Authorized Version’

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in the eighteenth century and almost deified by the Romantics (led by Coleridge), and, eventually, judged to be a true glory of English literary style. Behind these hyperbolic assessments lay the enjoyment deriving from the flow of passionate rhetoric, the masterly, memorable Homeric similes morally interpreted, like daybreak or the river’s rush, the flight of a lark or the crawling of the worm – the same wonder we find in Traherne, fine miniatures and imaginative exploits that would fit quite nicely in any anthology, even without any specific reference to religion or morality. Taylor always makes for pleasant reading, although he can be verbose and elementary in the examples he chooses; and, indeed, he was addressing the general public, not an intellectual elite. In recent years, he has lost in importance, and his name appears more and more rarely in textbooks and anthologies, if at all. Eliot was aware of this as early as 1927, when he stated that Andrewes was second to none in his contribution to the spiritual formation of the Anglican Church. Taylor, on the other hand, serene and accommodating, never aggressive or threatening, made tolerance the new standard of Anglicanism after fifty years of persecution of Dissent. In 1647, he wrote an extensive apology based on the admission that the Scriptures are ambiguous and the ideas of theologians fallacious. He published his collected sermons in 1651 and compiled two popular handbooks on holy living and holy dying (1650 and 1651), besides Ductor Dubitantium (1660), a densely casuistic study of cases of conscience. § 30. The ‘Authorized Version’ The 1611 Bible, which I introduce now because its assimilation happened gradually during the seventeenth century, was commissioned seven years earlier by James I, who entrusted the translation to a team of fortyseven divines whose identities are known, and seven others who have remained anonymous. Bishop Lancelot Andrewes was appointed supervisor of the project. Divided into six committees, two each working at Westminster, Oxford and Cambridge, they formed a modern, efficient équipe, exchanging their work in the intermediate stages of translation for discussion and coordination. The individual parts were then submitted to a central committee for final approval. Contrary to most works written by several authors – in this case a large number of scholars from different

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backgrounds – an almost miraculous uniformity, not only of interpretation, but of style, too, was reached. It is normally stressed that this version was not a translation of the Scriptures ex nihilo, but, rather, a revision of previous English translations. It came as the conclusion of a work in progress that stretched back to Bede through the milestones of Wyclif, Tyndale, Coverdale, the ‘Geneva Bible’ of 1560 and the ‘Bishops’ Bible’ of 1568. One of the wisest, most far-reaching and dynamic decisions taken by the weak and much-criticized James I, was, in fact, forced upon him by increasing Puritan aggressiveness during the ecclesiastical conference held in 1604 at Hampton Court. Another historical generalization is that this translation of the Bible marks a kind of year zero, a terminus a quo of English literary culture. The concept of the ‘life’ of a text is debatable, but this King James’s Bible set a record of longevity, becoming the official, ‘authorized’ version, without revision or correction, up to 1881–1885. First of all, it was an instrument of national cohesion, both because for three centuries it united the tastes, aims, objectives and theological positions of the whole range of Protestant sects and confessions, and because it became a reading book for the newly literate classes. It was an essential part of every home in England, a ‘first aid kit’ and infallible guide through all of life’s difficulties, an oracle providing answers to every question. 2. The focus of the translation was undeniably on the Old, rather than New Testament. One common exegetical error, which this version sanctioned, was that, after the Jews, it was the English who were to be considered ‘the chosen people’ – more precisely, the Puritans saw themselves as inspired by God to overturn tyrants and the governments of the wicked, and in general to usher in a new world. Linguistically and lexically, the translators reached a compromise, avoiding the most obvious archaisms of the previous versions – but as the first statistics showed, preserving 93 per cent of the words of Anglo-Saxon origin.1 Reacting against the end of the century’s delight in euphuisms, the translators were scrupulously faithful to the diction of the original Hebrew – solemn, anaphoric, repetitive, chant-like. For the professional writers of the time, the 1611 Bible was 1

CHI, vol. IV, 37.

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something between a tool and a text, as shown by the fact that almost all of them attempted translations from the Scriptures, especially the Psalms. The cultural spin-off of the Authorized Version was immense, not only in England (some masterpieces, like those of Milton and Bunyan, would have been unthinkable and impossible without it, and its influence extends to Carlyle, Ruskin and Browning), but, to an even greater degree, in the American colonies. The cadenced, unrhymed prose of the Authorised Version is the backbone of most subsequent prose writing. Like all sweeping generalizations, the one that maintains that the 1611 Bible helped forge the unique character of the literature that followed it, is suggestive. The Hebrew original expressed an oriental mentality alien to and irreproducible in other languages, and the English text itself is dotted with cruces that were tackled with the limited critical tools available at the time. Right from the first seventeenth-century biblical exegesis, scholars threw themselves into the hunt for allegorical interpretations that gave rise to misunderstandings, equivocation, pseudo-ideology and, at worst, the absolutization of individual verses, and the attribution of literal meaning to expressions that are, probably, metaphorical or symbolic. This kind of esoterism, this creeping prophetic tone, this sabotaging of logic are responsible, joined with other influences, for various examples of Romantic and post-Romantic mythopoiesis like Blake’s and Yeats’s. The Bible was to remain the paladin and guardian of ‘poetry’, while the Royal Society and the ‘new philosophy’ undertook a road that ran parallel, promising no final convergence. § 31. Milton* I: The uncreated idiom In the middle of the seventeenth century it would have been impossible to even think of becoming the greatest English poet of all time, and 1

*

The Works, ed. F. A. Patterson et al., 20 vols, New York 1931–1940; Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. M. A. Hughes, New York 1957; The Poems, ed. A. Fowler and J. Carey, 2 vols, London 1980; Complete Prose Works, ed. M. Wolfe et al., 8 vols, New Haven, CT 1953–1982; John Milton, ed. S. Orgel and J. Goldberg, Oxford 1991. The Sonnets of Milton, ed. J. S. Smart, Oxford 1921. A new complete edition in several volumes is in course of publication by Oxford University Press from 2008. Italian translations of Paradise Lost include those of R. Rolli (eighteenth-century), A. Maffei and

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L. Papi (nineteenth-century), A. Muccioli (Firenze 1933), D. Pettoello (Torino 1950), R. Sanesi (2 vols, Milano 1984 and 1987, with a partial translation of F. Kermode’s essay ‘Adam Unparadised’, published in Renaissance Essays, London 1973, 260–97, and with an excellent bibliography until its date). Areopagitica, ed. G. Giorello, Bari 1987, contains a very useful introduction. Life. D. Masson, The Life of John Milton: Narrated in Connexion with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of His Time, 7 vols, Cambridge and London 1859–1894; The Early Lives of Milton, ed. H. Darbishire, London 1932, 1966; The Life Records of John Milton, ed. J. M. French, 5 vols, New Brunswick, NJ 1949–1958; J. H. Hanford, John Milton, Englishman, New York 1949; W. R. Parker, Milton: A Biography, 2 vols, Oxford 1968; C. Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, London 1977; A. N. Wilson, The Life of John Milton, New York 1983; C. C. Brown, John Milton: A Literary Life, Basingstoke 1995; B. K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton, Malden, MA 2001; A. Beer, Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer and Patriot, London 2008. Criticism. Critical evaluation begins with Samuel Johnson in his Lives of the Poets. Overviews in A. J. Waldock, ‘Paradise Lost’ and its Critics, Cambridge 1947; Milton Criticism: Selections from Four Centuries, ed. J. Thorpe, New York 1950; R. M. Adams, Ikon: John Milton and the Modern Critics, Ithaca, NY 1966. The bibliography is immense and is growing by the day. Here are some of the essential books and articles, starting from the early twentieth century. D. Saurat, Milton, Man and Thinker, Eng. trans., London 1925, 1944; E. M. W. Tillyard, Milton, London 1930, 1956, 1961, and Studies in Milton, London 1951; F. R. Leavis, ‘Milton’s Verse’, in Revaluation, London 1936, Harmondsworth 1978, 46–67, and ‘Mr Eliot and Milton’ together with ‘In Defence of Milton’, in The Common Pursuit, London 1952, Harmondsworth 1962, 9–32 and 33–43; A. Guidi, Milton, Milano 1940; G. McColley, Paradise Lost: An Account of Its Growth and Major Origins, Chicago, IL 1940; C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost, Oxford 1942, 1960; C. M. Bowra, From Virgil to Milton, London 1945; T. S. Eliot, Milton, London 1947, and ‘Milton’, in On Poetry and Poets, London 1957; E. M. Pope, Paradise Regained: The Tradition and the Poem, Baltimore, MD 1947; B. Rajan, ‘Paradise Lost’ and the Seventeenth-Century Reader, London 1947, and The Lofty Rhyme: A Study of Milton’s Major Poetry, London 1970; H. Darbishire, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Oxford 1951; A. Stein, Answerable Style: Essays on ‘Paradise Lost’, Seattle, WA 1953, and The Art of Presence: The Poet and ‘Paradise Lost’, Berkeley, CA 1977; K. Muir, John Milton, London 1955; H. F. Fletcher, The Intellectual Development of John Milton, 2 vols, Urbana, IL 1956, 1962; D. Bush, Paradise Lost in Our Time: Some Comments, New York 1957, and John Milton, New York 1964; E. Chinol, Il dramma divino e il drama umano nel Paradiso perduto, Napoli 1957; D. Daiches, Milton, London 1957, 1966 (republished in DAI, vol. I, 390–457, one of the best general introductions to be found in any textbook of literary history); R. Tuve, Images and Themes in Five Poems by

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Milton, Cambridge, MA 1957; J. S. Diekhoff, Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’: A Commentary on the Argument, New York 1958; I. G. MacCaffrey, ‘Paradise Lost’ as Myth, Cambridge, MA 1959; M. Praz, ‘Milton e Poussin’, in Gusto neoclassico, Napoli 1959; The Living Milton, ed. F. Kermode, London 1960; W. Empson, Milton’s God, London 1961, 1965, Cambridge 1981; A. Davidson Ferry, Milton’s Epic Voice: The Narrator in Paradise Lost, Cambridge, MA 1963; C. Ricks, Milton’s Grand Style, Oxford 1963; D. M. Wolfe, Milton in the Puritan Revolution, New York 1963; L. L. Martz, The Paradise Within, New Haven, CT 1964, and Poet of Exile: A Study of Milton’s Poetry, New Haven, CT 1980; N. Frye, The Return of Eden: Five Essays on Milton’s Epics, Toronto 1965; H. Gardner, A Reading of ‘Paradise Lost’, Oxford 1965; E. A. J. Honigmann, Milton’s Sonnets, New York 1966; B. Kiefer Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning, and Art of ‘Paradise Regained’, Providence, RI 1966, and ‘Paradise Lost’ and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms, Princeton, NJ 1985; C. A. Patrides, Milton and the Christian Tradition, Oxford 1966, Milton’s Epic Poetry, Harmondsworth 1967, and, as editor, Milton’s Lycidas: The Tradition and the Poem, Columbia, MO 1983; B. Broadbent, Some Graver Subject: An Essay on ‘Paradise Lost’, London 1967; S. Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in ‘Paradise Lost’, New York 1967, and How Milton Works, Cambridge, MA and London 2001; P. Murray, Milton, The Modern Phase, London 1967; Twentieth Century Interpretations of ‘Samson Agonistes’, ed. G. M. Crump, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1968; J. Carey, Milton, London 1969; J. B. Leishman, Milton’s Minor Poems, London 1969; CRHE, ed. J. T. Shawcross, 2 vols, London 1970 and 1971, also the author of With Mortal Voice: The Creation of ‘Paradise Lost’, Lexington, KY 1982, and John Milton: The Self and the World, Lexington, KY 1993; H. Blamires, Milton’s Creation: A Guide Through ‘Paradise Lost’, London 1971; L. Potter, A Preface to Milton, London 1971; M. Cappuzzo, Il ‘Paradise Lost’ di John Milton, Bari 1972; W. Kerrigan, The Prophetic Milton, Charlottesville, VA 1974, and The Sacred Complex: On the Psychogenesis of ‘Paradise Lost’, Cambridge, MA 1983; R. M. Frye, Milton’s Imagery and the Visual Arts: Iconographic Tradition in the Epic Poems, Princeton, NJ 1978; A Milton Encyclopedia, ed. W. B. Hunter, 9 vols, Lewisburg, PA 1978–1983; M. A. Radzinowicz, Toward ‘Samson Agonistes’: The Growth of Milton’s Mind, Princeton, NJ 1978, and Milton Epics and the Book of Psalms, Princeton, NJ 1989; F. C. Blessington, ‘Paradise Lost’ and the Classical Epic, London 1979; A. K. Nardo, Milton’s Sonnets and the Ideal Community, Lincoln, NE 1979; J. M. Webber, Milton and His Epic Tradition, Seattle, WA 1979; J. Wittreich, Jr, Visionary Poetics: Milton’s Tradition and His Legacy, San Marino, CA 1979, and Feminist Milton, Ithaca, NY 1987; G. K. Hunter, Paradise Lost, London 1980; S. P. Revard, The War in Heaven: ‘Paradise Lost’ and the Tradition of Satan’s Rebellion, Ithaca, NY 1980; A. Burnett, Milton’s Style, London 1981; T. N. Corns, The Development of Milton’s Prose Style, Oxford 1982; D. R. Danielson, Milton’s Good God, Cambridge 1982; D. K. McColley, Milton’s Eve, Urbana, IL 1983; Milton’s Lycidas: The Tradition and the Poem,

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of holding on to the title for hundreds of years (with the exception of the early twentieth century), without a significant leap in technical skill and the concept of an important project – one might call it a ‘mission’. Various other contemporary poets possessed, if not genius, then something close to genius, but have handed down works of indifferent quality that were often left to fend for themselves, so to speak. Some high-ranking dilettantes – princes, even – wrote with scrupulous care and commitment, but were too taken up with court or diplomatic duties, or the demands imposed by ecclesiastical office. Sometimes, death came before they could write their masterpiece. John Milton (1608–1674) risked a similar fate, but the Restoration was to be his fortune in disguise. From 1640, the promising poet decided to serve his country by using his pen to defend the new-born Commonwealth. As a consequence, for the next considerable number of years he wrote little poetry and a lot of prose, especially in the militant genre of the pamphlet, which is by nature extemporary and short-lived. If no great changes had taken place, we would speak of Milton today as an upgraded Marvell. Instead, the events of 1660 made Milton free to become Milton. For years he had nurtured great ambitions of writing an English epic in the manner of Spenser, and had laid out and examined ideas, plots, themes, and had even composed a few fragments of dramatic verse.

ed. C. A. Patrides, Columbia, MO 1983; S. Budick, The Dividing Muse, New Haven, CT 1985; C. Kendrik, Milton: A Study in Ideology and Form, New York and London 1986; Re-Membering Milton, ed. M. Nyquist and M. W. Ferguson, New York and London 1987; M. Sestito, L’illusione perduta: saggio su John Milton, Roma 1987; C. Belsey, John Milton: Language, Gender, Power, Oxford and New York 1988; J. S. Bennett, Reviving Liberty: Radical Christian Humanism in Milton’s Great Poems, Cambridge, MA 1989; The Cambridge Companion to Milton, ed. D. Danielson, Cambridge 1989, 1992, radically revised in 2013; D. Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History, Cambridge 1990; M. Di Cesare, Milton in Italy, Binghamton, NY 1991; L. L. Knoppers, Historicizing Milton, Athens, GA 1994; J. M. Evans, Milton’s Imperial Epic, Ithaca, NY 1996; Milton and the Imperial Vision, ed. B. Rajan and E. Sauer, Pittsburgh, PA 1999; M. Jordan, Milton and Modernity: Politics, Masculinity, and ‘Paradise Lost’, Houndmills 2001; D. Hawkes, John Milton: A Hero of Our Time, London and New York 2010; G. Teskey, The Poetry of John Milton, Cambridge, MA 2015.

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In little less than fifteen years he completed and published the three classicalbiblical works that identify and define him. Milton is a solitary writer, a unique, isolated, gigantic genius worlds away from rapture and effusion – as Taine portrayed him – and one who goes his own way with no need of fellowship. When young, he had followed the customary path of any aspiring writer in seventeenth-century England: educated first at one of several famous public schools, then at either Oxford or Cambridge; but already his career was punctuated by demurrals and extraordinary refusals: he turned down a position at court, and the prospect of becoming a curate or country vicar, or even, eventually, a bishop. According to some, after a certain date, he stopped attending any kind of place of worship, and belonged to no church. In short, an anti-clerical, like Dante. At the end of his course of studies, the young Milton possessed a vast humanistic culture that enabled him to write poetry in Italian, Latin and Greek, as well as to open all the doors of classical learning. He also wondered what use to make of all this knowledge. 2. The Milton of 1640 was not very different from other postReformation poets. Like them, but more than them, he was a literary and ideological oxymoron: he is often defined as a Puritan humanist, which is, after all, a contradiction in terms; he is a monist, but only after realizing that he is a binarist; his moods swing from cheerfulness to pensiveness – a spontaneous attraction to the joys of life followed by rejection dictated by reason. In heuristic terms, Milton attempts to unify and harmonize centrifugal with centripetal forces – classical paganism and Renaissance humanism, to be reconciled with Puritanism by a kind of spasmodic mediation. The young Milton wrote imitations of Ovid and translations of the Psalms, and acknowledged what he was to deny after 1660 – that is, that he ‘followed Spenser’. Critics have by now amply documented his relationship to various different, and conflicting, ideologies: Hermetic occultism, mid-century sectarianism, radical fringes like Socinianism, Anabaptism and Millennialism – an extreme eclecticism that throws light on Milton’s controversial theological positions, many of which are enigmatic, not to say heretical. There are very early signs that Milton ‘studied’ to become the new prophet of a regenerated England, and the author of a national epic, which he began about fifty years later, and made into, not a national,

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but a supranational, poem, beyond the dramatic, beyond the celebratory. Paradise Lost unsuccessfully attempts a synthesis between, on the one hand, the theological vision of humanity that has fallen but is capable of rising again and re-creating an ‘inner paradise’, now that Eden has been lost, and, on the other, Milton’s personal drama expressed in the coolly reasoned allegory representing the end of the aspirations of the English revolution. Milton preparing himself to take on the role of national bard brings to mind the future protagonists of two novels by George Eliot, Latimer and Daniel Deronda, who discover they have lived blindly through the various steps that lead to the epiphany of their investiture as mouthpieces of their race. The only difference is that in Milton’s case, this supernatural call to arms was heard and understood immediately. 3. Though he already had clear in his mind the symbolic contents and the end of the epic, Milton still had to find the appropriate language in which to express them. In the following sections, I shall examine the linguistic and stylistic aspects of Paradise Lost, as well as looking at the implications inherent in the choice of poetic genres. Initially Milton used Latin in both poetry and prose; he then attempted to express in his native tongue – less compromised, but still compromised – ‘some graver subject’. His aim was to reconcile diverging signifier and signified. The English he had at his disposal was the same used by poets who before him had written about completely different things. So Milton’s career might be summarized, like Joyce’s, as the search for an adequate poetic language – a style. As it happened, Joyce, like Milton, was blind, or partially blind. Now, Milton wrote in Latin so as to reach and be understood by the whole of Europe. Latin was the tongue of Catullus and Ovid, but also, bivalently, the language of the Vulgate and the Fathers of the Church, close to and immersed in religion, therefore. When Milton girded himself to forge a new language in Paradise Lost, he rejected the graceful, reassuring manner of his early poems and fashioned a style that would come to be defined as ‘Latinate’. He could do no more. At the same time, there is no contemporary poetic genre that Milton does not use and bend to his needs – the eclogue, the sacred ode, the pastoral, elegy and sonnet, up to the epic itself. 4. Ever since 1667 Paradise Lost, in its theology and language, has represented, understandably, a clear dividing line in English poetry, and

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its popularity has increased or decreased in accordance with taste and the epistemic climate of the period. The controversy initiated by Johnson and lasting well into the last century saw interventions by all the great names of English literary criticism. After the two main seventeenth-century testimonials of Marvell and Dryden, and the lukewarm interest shown by Addison, the eighteenth century labelled him ‘sublime’, and the heroic epic found its expression in the heroic couplet; but the period was hostile to battles of ideas, and Milton left the centre stage. All the great Romantics, however, had something to say about him, and two schools of thought emerged which were to wage war for the best part of 100 years: the Satanic school, led by Blake, who claimed that Milton was on Satan’s side without knowing it;1 and the ‘non-ideological’, which read Milton only for the ‘sublime music’ of his verse and ignored his ideas. Blake and Fuseli illustrated the poem, depicting Satan, not as a repulsive monster, but with the powerful beauty of a figure by Michelangelo. Blake was obsessed, and indeed wrote part of a poem entitled Milton, while Shelley, inspired by the Satan of Paradise Lost, wrote one on Prometheus. ‘Musical Milton’ was compared with ‘visual Dante’ by Coleridge, Macaulay and Carlyle.2 The first dissenting voice was that of Hippolyte Taine, who praised the superlative early poems but considered Paradise Lost uneven and dry, with God presented as a kind of schoolmaster, and the happiness of Adam and Eve before the Fall not suited to an epic. At the end of the nineteenth century – for example, in the Hopkins-Bridges-Patmore correspondence – earnest, meticulous, academic attention was paid to Milton’s prosody, while his subject matter was almost completely ignored.3 In the twentieth century, Ezra Pound weighed in with exaggeratedly iconoclastic comments, followed in 1936 by the more refined Eliot, then by Leavis,4 advocating that Milton be removed from the canon 1 2 3 4

Dryden had already used these very words in his 1693 essay on Virgil and the Aeneid: that Milton might be considered to have written a great heroic poem ‘if the Devil had not been his hero, instead of Adam’. Cf. my essay, ‘Alcune considerazioni sul ritrattismo letterario’, now in IDM, 69–81. Hopkins maintained that Milton was ‘a scoundrel’, but only because he approved of divorce. Kermode 1973, 297, who mentions Robert Graves’s ‘great dislike’ of Milton.

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on the grounds of being a ‘bookish’ poet with no sense of the particular, incapable of studying nature, and, above all, the initiator of the famous, and deplorable, dissociation of sensibility, in direct opposition to Donne. The charge levelled by the two poets was, in short, that for 200 years Milton had imposed his excessively Latinate English as the language of poetry, instead of favouring the creation of a new literary language suitable to all kinds of poetry, not only epic. British critical sensitivity was offended by such disrespect and disparagement, especially coming from two Americans, and reacted at first with a murmured – though sometimes hysterical – sentimental and chauvinist overestimation of Milton. The appreciative comments on the early poetry were often tautological, or purely exclamatory, and were limited to extolling their excellence compared with contemporary poetry, without offering any reason as to why this excellence should be taken for granted. In 1971 Frank Kermode called for the ‘liberation’ of Milton – in other words, his reinstatement in the English canon. It was rather as if Greek literature had first eliminated then re-admitted the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Kermode pronounced Paradise Lost ‘the most intricately beautiful poem in the world’,5 a risky and excessive encomium. In the last fifty years, things have gone as expected: critics have modulated their tones according to fashion and convenience, sometimes influenced by the discovery of previously unknown documents, or by new research into various aspects of Milton’s opus, historical, juridical, theological or political. Milton is still not a best-seller, and cannot be said to ‘influence’ contemporary English poetry; but he does provoke passionate discussion, and is a primary subject of academic research. Already as long ago as 1969, one critic began by saying that ‘Milton [was] an industry’,6 adding some impressive data to prove his point. Twenty years later, in 1992, the number of books and articles dedicated to him probably equalled the annual bibliographies of Shakespeare and Dickens.7 Today there is a vast worldwide family of  ‘Miltonists’, who through the years have produced scores of books, articles and conference speeches, fostering a critical debate that has become 5 6 7

KRI, 181. Carey 1969, 7. Cf. D. Griffin, ‘Milton’s Literary Influence’, in Danielson 1992, 258–9.

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so highly specialized as to be precluded to the common reader. The difficulty of finding a common thread in the tangle of readings peppered by an infinite number of cross-references is compounded by the bitter, jealous rivalry among renowned critics, each anxious to assert a kind of monopoly on the poet, as if he were a tailor’s dummy, or a clone to which the critic attributes his own ideas, fixations, and fears.8 § 32. Milton II: Early works Milton’s work matures with time and comprehends several quite different poetic genres. After the twenty years spent as secretary to the Commonwealth, and the prose works resulting from them, the poet reemerges, and strikes out for new poetic destinations. His poetic career runs parallel to the distinct periods of his life: self-contained biographical blocks (traditionally three) mirror quite clearly as many phases in his intellectual and aesthetic development. His praxis is based on his biography, and Milton designs and shapes reality like a philosopher, in the image and likeness of his Erlebnis. In other words, the events of his life form an indispensable background to his work; I shall be examining the unique one-to-one relationship between the two in the following sections. Milton’s work is teleological but also, above all, dialectical. The collection of early poetry – published in 1645 under the title of Poems – is curious: it is clearly too ‘slender’ for a thirty-seven-year-old with Milton’s ambitions; it almost suggested ‘writer’s cramp’ and might be taken not as a first step but as the closing stage of the brief career of some post-Elizabethan poet – the end of an experience with which the author was far from satisfied, as he himself admitted in a note appended to the collection. Even though Poems contains some of the most famous, most accomplished, and most musical of Milton’s compositions, they may nonetheless ‘jar’: they are too full of pagan echoes, or compromises, to be the kind of sacred poetry that Milton aspired to write. In reality, he was passing through a prolonged phase of waiting, as he was to admit in his sonnet on his blindness. He was preparing himself. As in the case of Jesus at Cana, his time had not yet 8

Cf., for example, in TLS (31 August 2001, 3–5), A. Fowler’s invective against S. Fish and his 2001 book.

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come, but any moment might be his moment. There is an allusion to this moment of transition in the last line of Lycidas. 2. Milton was born in 1608 in London’s Cheapside. His father is usually referred to as a ‘scrivener’ (the profession is now extinct), a kind of lawyer, though the exact nature of his work is not clear. What is certain is that he was well off.9 His interests were wide-ranging, and included music, of which he was a gifted performer and composer; indeed, many of his works were present in the musical repertoires of the time. He encouraged his son’s great expectations by appointing a tutor, then enrolling him in St Paul’s, the best school in London. Milton then went on to Cambridge, where he developed a distrust of rhetoric, and inveighed in his Latin prolusions against Scholasticism. He gave a demonstration of character when he took issue with his tutor and was ‘rusticated’ as a result. During his suspension from the university he wrote Latin poems in praise of ‘otium’ and enjoyment, as well as one on the Gunpowder Plot. While still at university he acquired the reputation of being upright, passionate and fiercely independent, but was also chaffed as ‘the Lady of Christ’s’ because of his good looks, his aversion to sports, and his bookishness (from an early age he was in the habit of reading and studying until past midnight, doing his eyesight no good). After receiving his M. A. he spent six years (1632–1638) in the pleasant country retreat of Horton in Buckinghamshire, during which he began, by himself, an intense apprenticeship for his poetic career. So it might be said that at thirty Milton, as Johnson remarked, had not yet experienced real life.10 He could be taken as a model for a well-known psychiatric dyscrasia to be found in many intellectuals: he was a forceful individualist, displaying a hypertrophic super-ego, victim of an over-extended anal phase.11 In spite

9 10 11

He was also, on the side, a moneylender. Hawkes 2010 has much to say on Milton Sr’s links with this ‘Satanic sect’. Johnson’s pithy definition is too good to omit: ‘Milton […] was a genius that could cut a Colossus from a rock; but could not carve heads upon cherry-stones’ (13.6.1784 in Boswell’s Life). B. Lewalski (MAR, vol. I, 889 n. 5) calls Kerrigan’s 1983 study ‘the most impressive application of psychological criticism to Milton’s work’. Shawcross 1993 is an example of Jungian psychobiography.

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or because of this, he accepted without demur his father’s wishes (it was he who wanted him to become a paragon of learning), though they were not too demanding for his son to write a Latin ode to him, ‘Ad patrem’. He had taken a vow of chastity but suffered from his suppressed sexual urges; he longed for the pleasures of life, and immediately withdrew when they were offered.12 After graduating, he decided against taking orders, put off by the pro-Catholic tendencies imposed on the clergy by Archbishop Laud. However, his violent disgust at the corruption of the Church did not lead to atheism or loss of faith, but stimulated his search for truth in freedom, and strengthened his lay intransigence. 3. In the poetry written in the first thirty years of his life, published, as I mentioned, in 1645, Milton appears to be searching for a nexus between paganism and Christianity. At the same time, he shows more affinity to late Renaissance Italian poetry than other contemporary English poets. Above all, the young Milton is the last of the Spenserians. Nor should it be forgotten that the subject matter of the English poems is present in a seminal stage in the Latin, more specifically, Ovidian elegies of the late 1620s.13 ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’,14 the first truly ‘Miltonic’ poem, consists of a proem in rhyme royal followed by a ‘hymn’ of twenty-seven stanzas of eight lines, the last of which is an alexandrine. The individual stanzas are like a rosary of visual and conceptual images principally on the meaning of Christmas, but digressing at times. In the proem a series of oxymora and antitheses anticipate the mystery of the Incarnation. In the ‘Hymn’ the reader is surprised by the daring image of a guilty nature that must undress, dress again, and hide her shame: she wished to ‘wanton with the sun’ and instead covers herself with snow to placate her desire – the antithesis is one that was painfully relevant for Milton at that stage of his life. Right from

12 13 14

He is reported to have exclaimed when in Venice: ‘I would like to die here and be buried beneath the velvet of these canals’. Translated into English verse by Cowper in 1808. The first of a series of poems on the liturgical calendar, of which only a fragment on the Passion survives. The general opinion is that this poem is unfinished because the Puritan in Milton venerated the heroic, triumphant Christ rather than the suffering figure on the Cross.

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the first stanza, we are presented with ideas and conceits common to the religious poetry of the time: not much separates these lines from the song of the shepherds in Crashaw,15 though Milton elevates what are, in effect, commonplaces thanks to an element of gracefulness and sobriety. The birth of Christ is accompanied by a hitherto unheard music of the spheres, which brings back the Golden Age, with Christ’s abolition of original sin, of vanity, and, above all, of hell. Euphorically, as in a kind of day dream, the hymnist announces the institution of the reign of Justice, and the opening of the gates of Heaven, but then stops, remembering that first Christ will have to undergo the Passion, which appears, lit up by a photographic flash, followed at once by the vision of the irate, defeated Satan, a vision which is naturally proleptic, since the young poet grasps immediately the connection between sin, fall, corruption, the closing of the doors of salvation, their re-opening by virtue of the incarnation, suffering and death of the son of God, whose coming coincides with the rout of those pagan divinities who will re-appear as Satan’s companions of misadventure in Paradise Lost. Milton, however, seems to follow the flight of the fleeing gods with something like nostalgia. 4. ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’16 are, in fact, a single poem in two parts, which in the end appear to suggest that the poet is destined to become the prophetic interpreter of sacramental nature. Perhaps there is an allusion to Milton’s rejection of the religious life, though in that case the order of the two poems should be inverted. ‘Il Penseroso’ does affirm the need for meditation in the peace of a shady garden, like Marvell’s, a church without a structure of brick or stone. The two titles point to Milton’s assimilation of 15 16

§ 17.2. Possibly a contemptuous allusion to Crashaw is ‘any lay Papist of Loretto (sic)’ at the end of Areopagitica. IZZ, 529–30, finds echoes from Tasso’s ‘Per il presepio di Nostro Signore’ (‘For our Saviour’s crib’). As, for example, Izzo says, in IZZ, 526–7, they were first written in Latin prose and were part of the academic exercises at Cambridge that consisted in arguing for and against a motion. Izzo also speaks of major and minor versions of the same piece of music. In the field of pictorial art, too, it was common practice to juxtapose two opposing allegorical figures. Many have been reminded of the opening lines of Burton’s Anatomy or of Shakespeare’s Passionate Pilgrim. The offspring of these poems are Gray and the pre-Romantics and Romantics with their scenes of country life.

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Italian culture, both in the sense that the poems are a pictorial or sculptural paraphrase, like Michelangelo’s statues in the Sagrestia Nuova, and because the first title is the indication, by means of a metaphor or synecdoche, of musical ‘tempo’ – like ‘arioso’ or ‘serioso’ (Baroque music gave hundreds of pieces the title of ‘Folly’). Conceptually, the poems present two conflicting points of view or moods, the second excluding the first. So, thesis and antithesis, but no synthesis. Melancholy or pensiveness are incompatible with cheerfulness. Milton’s poetry already proposes the model of spontaneous joy mellowing into reflection. In ‘L’Allegro’, Melancholy is banished to a dark, damp, stinking cave to make way for the daughter of Venus, Euphrosyne, whose birth is described in some detail. The poet formulates the invitation to carpe diem in the great trochaic mimesis. Gradually, the joyful sight of dawn gives way to a pastoral cliché, with a pageant of country feasts and whirling dances, medieval castles with knights and ladies, then London theatres and, finally, soft, sensuous music. In ‘Il Penseroso’ the word ‘melancholy’ never completely loses its Burtonian association of ‘madness’, as suggested by the mythological comparisons of humans who, like Prometheus, have defied the gods, or have had incestuous relations, or have suffered rape (Vesta, Philomela). The nightingale is silent, however, and the poet wanders in the night lit by the moon ‘Like one that had been led astray / Through the heaven’s wide pathless way’, imagining he is in some Gothic or pre-Romantic cell poring over occult tomes. Milton is reflected in the figure of a misanthropist, begging Aurora, who has taken the place of Night, to lead him to some shady grove where he can dream and forget; on awakening, he asks again to be allowed to withdraw to some quiet cloister; anything to avoid the real world. If this is not prophetic, it is not far from it. 5. Lycidas, overtly a public funeral ode, and therefore an objective composition, is, in reality, a subjective de te fabula. The poem mourns the death by drowning, in the Irish Sea, of Edward King, a contemporary of Milton’s at Cambridge, though not a close friend, and, at the time of his death, set to enter the priesthood. He was also a poet.17 The elegy is in fact 17

King has already been mentioned in the section on Cleveland (§ 24), who was among the many contributors to a volume of commemorative verse. Edward King is unrelated to Bishop Henry King (§ 22).

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a wide-ranging reflexion, rhapsodic and visionary, on the prospects open to Milton at the time (1638): he had just lost his mother; he had said no to the religious life, and had, instead, chosen a literary career, without, however, the illusions of immortality he had once nurtured. He may have intended to go to Italy, finding in extremis, at the end of this poem, a way out of his predicament. This is why, in ‘Il Penseroso’, he appears as the melancholy man who has lost his way. Lycidas has always been considered the most perfect poem in English of all time, at least of its kind – the elegy – and dimensions – about 200 lines. What might seem to be an excessive assessment is due, in part, to its central theme, particularly dear to the English: undeserved and untimely death (King was only twenty-five when he died). Dozens, if not hundreds, of these elegies were to be written by English poets, culminating in a whole book of elegies like that of Ted Hughes for Sylvia Plath. Behind every single exemplar of this genre lies the question Milton embodies in Paradise Lost: how to justify the ways of God – or fate, for the non-believer – to man; how to explain and accept the premature death of innocent and promising people. If we look at the indentations, Lycidas divides into eleven sections of tortuous internal argument, often becoming rhapsodic in its flow and sometimes obscure. The form is the pastoral elegy and references to mythology pervade the whole poem. Lycidas, too, was a poet, and deserves a funeral poem; it is right that he should be mourned and sung of by the Muses. Curiously, the poem begins with an objection to some previous, non-existent, assertion, and closes with another enigmatic allusion, almost an extract of some meditation or dialogue the poet is holding with himself. The conjunctions ‘since’, ‘but’ and ‘yet’ initiate the central part of the argument, which is that the nymphs could have saved the drowning man. This fantasy is silenced by the voice of reason: they could have done little. Of these two typical Miltonic reactions to the events of life, it is always cold, down-to-earth rationality that wins the day. The comparison with Orpheus fits, because Orpheus too was a poet, who ended up dead in the water. Cynical concreteness wins, but only for a moment, also because the poet asks himself what good it is to cry and complain – Lycidas is dead now; would it not be better to have a good time with the nymphs? In short, to do what ‘L’Allegro’ advocates? An inner voice objects in what becomes a dramatic monologue:

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the desire for fame makes a man give up meaner delights, and yet he dies all the same; the second voice rebuts that the reward for one’s actions will be given after death, and it will be an eternal, heavenly reward. The poetic voice is hopeful and sceptical at the same time; it raises objections and answers them by itself. We are left in doubt as to who utters the words in brackets ‘(The last infirmity of noble mind)’; maybe it is an aside by the first voice. The account of the shipwreck by the ‘Herald of the Sea’ comes late; and suddenly, called by the metaphor of the sailor and fisherman, St Peter arrives on the scene and proceeds to denounce the corrupt clergy in prophetic tones, using obscure and esoteric images. The ‘blind mouths’ and, especially, the mysterious ‘two-handed engine’18 have a Dantesque ring. The elegy ends with the return of the fantastic; we have wept for Lycidas, but must weep no more; Lycidas lives, a soul in heaven, and as such will be the protector of those who sail in the sea where he was drowned. Most importantly, in the last section there is a grammatical change of person, from the first to the third, so that the poem turns into an unexpected dramatic monologue ending in a couplet that suggests Milton has succeeded in objectifying himself and his predicament, and has found the strength to continue his journey. § 33. Milton III: ‘Comus’ Two court masques, ‘Arcades’ (incomplete) and Comus (performed at Ludlow Castle in 1634 in honour of the newly elected Lord President of Wales, with music by Henry Lawes, who also acted in and directed the performance; the text was first published in 1637), are the last poetic works in English by Milton before Paradise Lost, apart from a handful of sonnets. It is often pointed out that Milton was unsuited to write these masques, in which the theme of chastity was in stark contrast to the usual subjects of the genre (and Comus does not include an antimasque), and that therefore his ‘product’ took his ‘clients’ by surprise. Comus is the first ambiguous tempter, and the chaste Lady the first defender of virtue and good. It is, in this light, an anticipation, with variations, and set in the world of fantasy,

18

Perhaps an axe.

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of the theme of Paradise Lost. That the victim of Comus should be referred to simply as the ‘Lady’ is significant: it is tempting to see here an allusion to the soubriquet Milton was given at Cambridge owing to his apparently effeminate looks and unassailable chastity (today’s equivalent might be something like ‘girlie’). Comus is also the first and, almost, only sortie by Milton into a genre he wanted to experiment and had the technical ability for – indeed, he goes well beyond its accepted code of expression. Of course, the pastoral drama is an Elizabethan genre based on a symbolic, archetypal place. The masque required a host of images and decorative elements to be conveyed with flowing ease. Later, the theme of the girl tempted by a magician, and fighting him off, will become the basic ingredient of the Gothic tale. In the prologue, the Attendant spirit informs the audience of Comus’ method: he offers wayfarers a ‘liquor’ that transforms them into beasts, an obsessive allusion to diabolic temptation in the form of juices or fruits that destroy what is divine in a man and reduce him to the level of a beast. This Genius of the wood, subsequently disguised as the shepherd Thyrsis, rescues maidens and all those in danger of falling. Comus announces the beginning of the night’s orgy, and takes the Lady, who has lost her way, into his ‘lowly cottage’. Enter her two brothers, one of whom praises this sister’s chastity, while the other is more elastic – two opposing views of human life. In Comus’ palace, the Lady refuses to drink the potion and treats her seducer with scorn, demonstrating considerable powers of argument. Comus echoes Marvell in inviting the Lady not to be ‘coy’ and to yield her virginity to him. The brothers chase the sorcerer away, but the Lady is left ‘spellbound’ and calls on Sabrina, a river nymph, to free her, which she does. § 34. Milton IV: The enslaved voice Between 1638 and 1639 Milton – who in the meantime had suffered the loss of his mother, as well as of Edward King and his childhood friend, Charles Diodati (twin deaths, both honoured by elegies, Diodati’s obviously in Latin)19 – travelled through France, Switzerland and Italy for a total of 19

Diodati’s uncle, whom Milton visited in Geneva on his way back in 1639, was a Protestant theologian and translator of the Bible. John Florio, too, was the son of an

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fifteen months. In Florence he participated, quite nonchalantly, in meetings of a neo-Platonic accademia, met Galileo (blind, and a prisoner of the Inquisition), aroused liking and interest in the people he met, though his strait-laced morality was the target of malicious comments from the ‘svogliato’ Malatesti.20 In Rome, he listened to the singing of the ‘divine’ Adriana Baroni, was treated with enormous respect by Cardinal Barberini, and feted in vain by the Jesuits, leaving him with the strengthened conviction that the English Church should never resemble that of Rome. In Naples, he struck up a friendship with the marquis, Giovanni Battista Manso, to whom he dedicated ‘Mansus’, a complimentary poem in Latin hexameters.21 In his belated grand tour, in short, Milton was carrying out a necessary cultural exploration, with plans to visit the places that had seen the birth of poetry. As a poet himself, he felt bound to go on this long literary pilgrimage to Rome, Florence, the Sicily of Theocritus, the Greece of the orators, philosophers, historians and tragedians. However, on receiving news from England of the worsening political situation there, he gave up the plan to go further south, and set off for home. For the next nine years he became a freelance polemicist, and in 1649 was appointed Secretary for Foreign Tongues in Cromwell’s directorate. The end of his career as a polemicist coincided with the fall of the Commonwealth. Milton was forced into hiding, then arrested, fined, pardoned and freed. His decision in 1640 to put aside his poetic ambitions was a heroic gesture of self-sacrifice for the public good.22 In number and intensity, the pamphlets written between Italian Protestant, and is remembered mainly for his connection with Shakespeare. The diaspora seems to have been extremely productive. Diodati’s father, Theodore, helped Florio in his translation of Montaigne’s Essais. 20 One of the members of the Accademia degli Svogliati [Academy of the Listless]. 21 In Venice, from where he sent copies of Monteverdi’s music to England, Milton may even have met the composer. On the possible echoes of Monteverdi’s Orfeo in Lycidas see Muir 1955, 46–7. 22 The only poetry written in these twenty years is represented by eighteen English sonnets, plus a tailed sonnet against the Presbyterians and in favour of the freedom of conscience. Taken together, they show a return to the Italian form (more precisely, that of Della Casa), consisting of two quatrains and two tercets with enjambments (‘the breaking of the verses’ is Tasso’s name for it). This is an aesthetic choice that

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1640 and 1660 might be remotely compared to the eye-witness accounts written by Orwell during the Spanish Civil War in 1936: articles throbbing with invective, infamy, lies, accusations and retorts, shot through by the restless spirit of ideological transformation, when political positions seemed to shatter into numberless factions within the same party or movement. The corpus of Milton’s prose is, for the most part, the province of political scientists, historians of the English Civil War, or students of the evolution of Milton’s political ideas. However, it throws light on his life and literary technique, belonging, as it does, to a further period of incubation (this time, like Eliot’s Latimer and Deronda, without being aware of it) and frustration: Milton suffers because he is unable to write poetry, but secretly he is getting ready to undertake the composition of a national epic. Hence, his prose is objective and argumentative, but curiously pierced and illuminated by scraps of autobiography, ever present in today’s anthologies. These autobiographical fragments often allude to the ‘poem of poems’ that is struggling for form inside his head; or they contain flashbacks, confessions concerning his recent past, prophesies and explanations of the magnum opus to come. Above all, Milton used a radically different style (of course, he had never written in prose before), that connects with the poetic language of Paradise Lost and represents an intermediate stage in the search for an epic style. His prose style is heavy, teeming with subordinate clauses; the tone is prophetic, solemn, apocalyptic, and already rich in Latinate words and constructions, archaisms and coinages; and, as he was to do more and more, he addresses the ‘reader’. In a way, you would almost think Carlyle is just round the corner.

moves the sonnet out of the love convention and frees it up for occasional use instead of the usual cycle of appeals addressed to real or mythological women. They are also composed in a slightly different style to that of his other poems – and are usually more stringent and sometimes stentorian. The three most famous ones are: a public denouncement of the massacre of the Waldensian Protestants in 1655, with its stern biblical overtones of wrath; and two private reflections, one on his blindness, and the other on a vision of his dead wife – it is not sure whether the first or the second. Obviously, this latter was written when Milton was already blind.

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2. In 1642 Milton married seventeen-year-old Mary Powell, the daughter of an Oxford royalist family. This marriage was similar to that of Ruskin, or Cecil’s to Lucy in Forster’s A Room with a View. A month after the wedding Mary went back to her parents, but then returned to her husband, reconciled to such an extent that she bore him three daughters before dying in childbirth in 1652.23 This experience led Milton to reflect on the sense of marriage and on the need for divorce in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643), followed by other pamphlets in 1644 and 1645, in which he argued his support for the dissolution of marriage in the case of physical impediments or mental incompatibility. His ‘journalistic’ skills had already been put to good use in 1641 after his return from Italy, when he lodged with his nephews (sons of his sister, Anne): his first pamphlets and books were in defence of the parliamentarian forces opposing the absolutism of the king, and in favour of the abolition of episcopacy. Among others were the so-called Apology for Smectymnuus (an acronym formed by the initials of the surnames of an influential group of prominent Puritan divines).24 In Of Reformation in England and The Reason of Church Government (1642) he openly advocated a Presbyterian form of church government. Most of the prose works (twenty-five, including tracts and pamphlets) are ephemeral. Milton himself admitted prose was a ‘cold element’, fit only, so he thought, for his ‘left hand’. Two have survived the test of time and are still read today because they are early examples of liberal enlightenment, and so address less contingent subjects. They are also surprisingly anti-Puritan (at least in the sense of a repressive, or compressive movement), one propounding the freedom of the press, the other the freedom of divorce. In 1644, Milton published Areopagitica, in reaction to a law approved by Parliament authorizing pre-publication censorship of material containing anti-Presbyterian

23

Their resentment of Milton is proverbial (but perhaps legendary) for obliging them to read to him in languages (Greek and Hebrew) of which they hardly knew the alphabet. 24 Milton wrote first a post-scriptum, then a rebuttal of Bishop Hall’s rebuttal of Smectymnuus. The name recalls another famous acronym, Marprelate, a cover for one or more Puritan polemicists at the end of the sixteenth century (see Volume 1, § 159).

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opinions. Milton argued that freedom of the press encourages virtue, which exists only to fight and defeat the forces of evil. Sceptics said then, and still say, that the real reason for Areopagitica was Puritan opposition to his divorce pamphlets. Milton discovers the relativism of truth 200 years before its nineteenth-century heyday: absolute truth cannot emerge – even as the consequence of  ‘one apple tasted’ by our first parents; truth can only be grasped partially, and then by means of ‘untruth’; in other words, the road to good lies through evil, or rather, the knowledge of evil. Of Education presents a valid pedagogic theory, which, essentially, goes back to Dante.25 It is not greatly different from sixteenth-century English treatises from Elyot on, which focus on how to form a ‘gentleman’, the pedagogic tools being literature, art, the use of weapons, physical exercise, as well as an interest in religion, ethics, philosophy, and, above all, the new science. Milton’s political pamphlets became more frequent with the intensification of the Civil War, and show greater or smaller adjustments in his way of thinking, with an initial, myopic Presbyterianism gradually shifting towards the positions of the Independents (in reality, a small group of regicides close to Cromwell). Reformation was to be completed – in Milton’s opinion it was urgent to ‘reform the Reformation’. He equated the foundation of the Commonwealth with the Second Coming, and in messianic tones acclaimed the destiny of England. Cromwell nominated him Latin Secretary in the State Council, and he in turn supported the legitimacy of the capture and execution of Charles, arguing, indeed, that there was a moral obligation to do so, in Eikonoklastes, in Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio (1651), and in Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda (1654). The first of these was an answer to Eikon Basilike, a defence of Charles ‘the saint’,

25

According to another explanation, after the deaths of the Apostles, Truth was dismembered like the body of Osiris. After recalling sporadic cases of censorship in Greek and Roman times, Milton sees it spread and become institutionalized with the Inquisition. He goes on to address the problem of whether the thing in itself is good even if the inventors are evil. Even if censorship were admissible, it would be impractical to censor every book believed to be dangerous. That Milton was preaching to deaf ears is proved by the burning of his ‘seditious’ books in 1661.

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erroneously thought to be the work of the king himself;26 the other two were attacks on Salmasius (the Frenchman, Claude Saumaise), who had published an indictment of the regicides that was widely read throughout Europe, and was triumphantly refuted by Milton; the other target was fellow Englishman, Alexander More, whom Milton believed, wrongly, to be the author of a public denunciation of the ‘English parricides’ and consequently reviled and insulted by Milton, who was, however, repaid in like coin. The last four pamphlets in chronological order were: a juridical tract; a proposal for the abolition of stipends for the clergy (1658); a half-hearted second proposal to found a free republic; much later (1673) yet another petition in favour of religious freedom. In the massive, antiTrinitarian and Arminian De Doctrina Christiana he espoused other heresies, like the belief in the death of the soul as well as that of the body.27 It was prudently withdrawn from circulation after 1660, and rediscovered, and published, only in 1825.28 § 35. Milton V: ‘Paradise Lost’ I. Genesis, allegory and theology of the poem After 1660 Milton went to live with his third wife in an unpretentious house in London. He had married Elizabeth Minshull in 1663. Relations with his daughters from his first marriage were strained: now blind, he was forced to dictate to amanuenses (often his daughters) what he had composed, usually during the night. He would rise early in the morning, pray, and listen to readings from the Bible (either the 1611 version or the Hebrew text). He would play the harmonium, and spend hours walking in his garden. He usually went to bed at nine o’clock. He led a far from ascetic life – he smoked his pipe, drank good wine, was tolerant and sociable, and got along well with his brother, who was a royalist during the Civil War and who may later have converted to Catholicism. He died of

26 § 1.4. 27 A heresy argued against by Thomas Browne at the beginning of § 7 and in § 37 (part I) of Religio Medici. 28 His huge History of Britain (1670), begun in the 1640s, gets as far as the Norman Conquest. This is perhaps what is left of Milton’s early aspiration to write a celebratory history of his country.

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cardiac complications arising from gout. Like many other classic poems, Paradise Lost underwent a long period of gestation, and appeared in two versions; a kind of Ur-Paradise Lost has been discovered, which I will discuss later. Milton began the actual writing of the poem, it would seem, in the mid-1650s, with daily batches of forty lines. He finished it some time before 1667. This first version was in ten books, while the second edition, in twelve books, was published in 1674,29 just before his death. The first seeds of the poem go back to at least the 1640s. A manuscript preserved in Trinity College, Cambridge, lists about 100 subjects,30 allowing us to believe that Milton at first had in mind a poem on King Arthur. After 1660, however, a poem celebrating the monarchy by a recent supporter of the Commonwealth would have been out of place. Together with the Arthurian subject, Milton abandoned the idea of using the dramatic form: the London theatres, which had just re-opened, were full of the new fashion of frivolity and amorous escapades. Milton wanted no part of this. His notes on the Book of Genesis are more detailed than the others, and contain an outline of a drama on Adam with the title of Adam Unparadised. Milton’s nephew affirmed he had seen with his own eyes a soliloquy by Satan that may have gone to form part of the fourth book of the epic poem. Paradise Lost comes about, seventy years later, as the second greatest English epic. Yet comparison with the Faerie Queene reveals several important differences, mainly because the Faerie Queene may be considered the most ‘poetic’ work of English poetry, which cannot be said for Paradise Lost. With respect to other contemporary, earlier or later poems, not only in English, based on the Bible, the Creation, the Fall, and other religious themes,31 Milton 29 Between the first edition (in ten books, equivalent to two five-act plays) and the second, books VII and X were divided into two in order to reach the Virgilian total of twelve. The change was ‘small but not insignificant’ (Orgel and Goldberg 1991, 853). 30 The precise number is ninety-eight, of which sixty were biblical and thirty-eight ‘British’. 31 As might be imagined, numerous sources have been discovered, amongst which are Andreini’s Adamo (1613), which Milton may have seen acted in Italy; Adamo caduto by Salandra (1647), Tasso’s Sette giornate del mondo creato (unrhymed), as noted by Praz (PSL, 273 and n. 2, excluding Salandra, however). The account by Milton’s nephew mentions other Italian sources, some of them improbable. The biblical book of Genesis

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stands by himself; only Dante is in the same class of poets at whose works ‘poser mano cielo e terra’ [‘Heaven and earth joined hands in building’]. It is not certain how much Milton knew of Dante, or whether he was influenced by him, although dozens of critics have compared them. Nor is it clear whether Milton knew the Commedia,32 and meant deliberately to imitate it, albeit from a distance. Books VI, VII and VIII are indeed very similar to Dante’s doctrinal cantos, with the Archangel Raphael taking the place of Virgil, and instructing Adam, like Dante, eager to learn, on what can be revealed – ‘not surpassing human knowledge’ – of the divine plan of creation. 2. The idea of writing a poem in blank verse, and above all, to divide the material up into twelve books, without stanzaic divisions of any type, represents an aesthetic choice for handling the large dimensions of the intended work. The first step had led Milton close to the dramatic genre, with a superdrama in ten acts. He rejected this option and turned, definitively, to the poem in blank verse. The long-running debate on the kind of verse used in his three epic works has equivocated, in my opinion, on the words ‘musical’ and ‘rhythmic’. Paradise Lost cannot be called a poem that prioritizes ‘verbal music’ – a rather vague concept, by the way. If by ‘verbal music’ we mean rhyme, internal rhyme, refrains, onomatopoeia, alliteration and other phonological ploys, then Milton’s poem is actually deficient in musicality. Milton plays with sound only occasionally and fortuitously. In fact, he avoids all unnecessary euphonic embellishment. He never seems to look for alliteration, and when he bumps into it, it is by pure chance.33 Nor is there any leaning towards pure song, lulling sounds and soft melody.

32

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was at the centre of seventeenth-century theological exegesis. Among forerunners in English one might cite Cowley’s Davideis (§ 23.3), David and Bethsabe by Peele (see Volume 1, § 94.3), and the poem on Christ Triumphant by the elder Fletcher (§ 7.1), together with other minor works. Later, Milton became famous especially in Germany, with Klopstock, and the librettos for Haydn’s and Handel’s oratorios. Bush 1964, 59, brings our attention to half a dozen notes on Dante in the Commonplace Book. In a lecture on Defoe, Joyce spoke of Paradise Lost as a ‘Puritanical transcription of the Divine Comedy’. Joseph Warton was in no doubt: ‘Milton was particularly fond of this writer’ (quoted in CHI, vol. X, 240). GSM, 166, points to assonance, which is, however, only used ‘now and then’.

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Enjambment is the norm, not the exception. In his short preface to the poem, Milton seems intent on reducing all marks of poetic diction. The idea that Paradise Lost is an eminently musical work was handed down by Tennyson, who spoke of Milton’s ‘organ voice’. Merging music with architecture, Milton is seen as an organist who creates vast cathedrals of sounds, whose long naves are lined by majestic columns. If it were not for obvious syntactic and lexical markers – long, winding sentences, inversions of subject and verb and noun and adjective, periphrases, elaborate similes, Latinisms – the verse of Paradise Lost might be called ‘rhythmic prose’ in mainly iambic pentameters (Saintsbury thought that blank verse always risks slipping into prose).34 In this case, the verse of Milton’s epic is very close to the prose of the pamphlets, and thus very far from the language of the early poems. More precisely, the prose of the early 1640s should be seen together with the poetry he had already written, or was soon to write – or much later, when he began to compose Paradise Lost. In other words, it can truly be said that ‘Milton wrote his least attractive prose at the very time he was composing his greatest poetry’. His creative urge was re-directed to the prose when an immediate poetic destination was lacking.35 3. In Paradise Lost, epithets and synonyms are repeated at length – while Dante is an unfailing source of coinages and neologisms. The sharp, startling visual, or auditory, image is not part of Milton’s stylistic repertoire, which abounds, instead, with words like the ever-present ‘sovran’ or ‘erect’, an adjective used by Sidney, as will be remembered, to indicate the man in whom reason is fully vigilant. Similes are compulsory in the epic, and are used to underline crucial events in the plot. It is debatable whether Milton is on the same level as Homer or Dante in the use of this rhetorical device. His similes are often weak, unfocused or forced, as

34

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Hopkins admired Milton for his ‘rhythm and metre’, with no reference to other kinds of musicality. Dryden wrote in heroic couplets, but in some works of an argumentative nature he also showed that ‘there was no impassable gulf between eloquent prose and poetry’ (BAUGH, vol. III, 728). T. N. Corn, ‘Milton’s Prose’, in Danielson 1992, 183–96 (192). Corn finds no explanation for the change in the prose after 1644 – terser, sharper, and less imaginative. Bush 1964, 175–6, suggests a similar comparison.

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T. S. Eliot remarked. Many times they are far-fetched, even self-defeating, as they complicate and obscure rather than clarify and illuminate, with their recondite references to mythology and geography. Often the end result is one of involuntary parody. Proof of strict control over the poetic material, as well as of a ‘metanarrative’ instruction, is found in a number of paratextual elements: a poem in heroic couplets by Marvell (present in all editions after 1674), preceded by one in Latin by Milton’s friend, Dr Samuel Barrow; a brief prose introduction by Milton himself, as I mentioned, on the controversial choice of blank verse: rhyme is a barbarous invention and a form of ‘modern bondage’. Each book is then introduced by an ‘Argument’ in prose, similar, in a sense, to the rough drafts recommended to would-be novelists. Paradise Lost, therefore, is a guided poem, carefully managed by a narrator super partes, who already knows the story of the temptation, of which the characters of the poem are, as yet, oblivious, but which is familiar to the contemporary reader. This superior knowledge, or omniscience, is disguised by the rhetorical device known as the protasis, in this case the Holy Spirit, or the Muses, called upon to inspire and lead the poet in his task. The extradiegetic narrator signals his presence in the sometimes excessive mythological or subsequent historical references, and makes no mystery of the fact that this is a story that is told with hindsight. A reader of Milton must therefore be well-versed in the western heroic tradition – Homer, Virgil, Lucretius, Ovid, Spenser, Ariosto, Tasso, Du Bartas – as well as in the science, or pseudo-science, of the day.36 Books VI and VII abound in examples of phatic speech: Raphael’s récit may be taken for one of the poetic ‘I’, whereas he is a character inside the story. Milton shows he is familiar with the whole range of rhetorical devices available to traditional epic poets and to the first novelists fifty years on. On the basis of Book VI, it is clear that the poem begins in medias res, and that the Ulysses of the situation is the Archangel Raphael, who recounts what has happened before. The second part of Book V is analeptic – it tells, from a different angle, the story of the rout of the rebel angels with which the poem begins. Book VI is entirely dedicated to the war in Heaven. In almost every book, the point 36 Milton’s descriptions of the planets, as Praz never tires of saying, would have been impossible before the age of the telescope.

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of view of the narration splits and, like a ‘fade to’ or with a ‘meanwhile’, opens on a different scenario. The reader would be gripped by suspense if he did not already know the outcome of the imminent temptation: there is Satan lying in wait, while the Archangel prolongs his account of preceding events, postponing the climax until Book IX. The biblical subtext is present in concentrated form: not many events are narrated, but those that are, are considerably expanded and enriched with detail. The techniques peculiar to poetry, the novel, and drama are interwoven in Paradise Lost. The blank verse is here the last development of a prosodic practice beginning with Marlowe. The more one reads, the more one finds places where the text, in single lines, imitates Elizabethan drama in the succession of addresses and speeches. This is a poem full of dialogues and debates, and above all, of monologues, like the monumental soliloquies of Satan. There is overwhelming evidence that Milton superimposed on the biblical Satan the huge number of portrayals – from Marlowe and Shakespeare onwards – of the Elizabethan ‘villain’, damned but tortured by doubt, free to do what he now ‘justly’ deplores and bemoans. 4. Paradise Lost is one great paraphrase: the ninety-odd verses contained in three chapters of the biblical Genesis are expanded to fill more than 10,000 lines of poetry, the bare biblical account amplified by ‘voices’ that critics, following Bakhtin and Bloom, have defined as ‘polyphonic’ and ‘aporetic’. It is a useful exercise to open Genesis and see how Milton has disassembled, then re-assembled the text, and in what, perhaps distorting, way he has read and re-written the story.37 Milton is aware that the biblical Word is sacred, but it is man’s prerogative to break its seals; there is a touch of irony, if not of blasphemy, in the often repeated refrain, found also in Paradise Regained, ‘to compare great things with small’. The action begins with the rout of Satan and his rebel angels: in Book IV, after an extra-narrative proem, we see Satan in the garden of Eden; in the last book, the action comes full circle with the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the earthly paradise; an angel with a sword is set to guard the gates, but not before the Archangel Michael has presented Adam with a pageant of human history up to the 37

See, as an example, the close reading carried out by Carey, with continuous references to Genesis, in Carey 1969, 75–122.

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Last Judgement. It was no bad thing that the poem was begun so late, as Milton was thus able to mould into a kind of only half-extinguished sphere (in part still red hot, that is) his whole spiritual and physical life, as well as the public events of the last twenty years, and place this fiery ball, or bolus, inside the work he was sitting down to write. Anyone tempted to reduce Paradise Lost to a precise political allegory, or, in a strictly biblical sense, to see in Genesis a ‘typological’ prophecy of events in England between 1640 and 1660, will be faced with the fact that things do not ‘add up’: if there is such an allegory, it has become ‘unhinged’. Two preliminary facts need to be borne in mind: the poem, whenever ‘conceived’, was certainly begun in its written form in the second half of the century; it was started, that is, at the height of the Protectorate, and coincided with the climax of Milton’s messianic ecstasy. The second fact is that the biblical story had its own internal diegesis to be respected, and that Milton could have used it as a vehicle for his political, or messianic vision only by re-modelling the biblical story in modern, or indeed modernistic or even postmodern terms.38 The most immediate allegorical interpretation is to see Satan as Cromwell,39 the unfallen Adam and Eve as the English people under the Protectorate, and God the Father as Charles I. However, this reading would suggest that Cromwell destroyed a perfect political regime instead of healing the nation. Logically, the pre- and post-lapsarian chronology should be inverted, Cromwell transformed into an angel, and God the Father deposed or decapitated. Only by means of an extreme and unconvincing deconstruction can Milton be accused of deploring Cromwell’s role in the death of Charles, and singing the praises of a prosperous and peaceful country ruined by the Commonwealth. It is easier to identify an allegorical meaning in the end of the poem: England resumes its journey after 1660, wounded, humbled, but ready to buckle under, in the knowledge that all is not lost. Nevertheless, after more than fifteen years of Civil War, Milton 38

Which is what Dryden did when he turned the poem into an opera libretto with the title of The State of Innocence, in 1674, when Milton was still alive. 39 Muir 1955, 129, observes that this identification was made by Chateaubriand but dismisses it as ‘absurd’, forgetting that, at about the same time, Dryden uses biblical figures to represent real people in Absalom and Achitophel.

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cannot but interpret reality in military terms: God the Father, the Son, and Satan are commanders of armies; the battles they fight are planetary, and modelled on episodes of war that Milton, like the rest of the population, had seen and could still see in their imagination. 5. The meaning of Paradise Lost, in the sense of the reasons behind that particular choice of subject, and its relation to the Arthuriad Milton thought of writing in the 1640s: this seems to me to be crucial and more worth debating than other more evanescent questions that trouble the sleep of today’s critics. Strangely enough, only E. M. W. Tillyard, in his Milton (1930), followed by another study eight years later, has come to grips with this problem. Tillyard’s essay is pertinent, though it was written in 1938,40 because it attempts to explain how a planned tragedy on King Arthur became one on Alfred the Great, and then, many years later, a poem on the Fall (the subject is, however, in the Trinity MS list). Milton gradually abandoned the idea of a patriotic poem that he envisaged in the early 1640s, says Tillyard, and began to contemplate a poem that in some way would reflect his disappointment with the parliamentary revolution. This would explain the deconstruction of Satan as Cromwell and God the Father as King Charles: a kind of punitive allegory, according to the critic, a bitter attack rather than a celebration. Yet Tillyard ends by saying that the question remains: why did Milton choose the Genesis story? Two facts go against the theory expounded in the 1938 essay: first, the Fall was a rather obvious choice and was at the top of the list right from 1640; second, the poem was begun when Milton was still an enthusiastic supporter of Cromwell, so much so that he was his Secretary. So the conceptual foundations of the work were laid a long time before the actual composition of Paradise Lost. At this point it becomes more reasonable to think that Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained should be read together, as complementary and interrelated, with the second as anything but a mere appendix to the first. However, it seems that this was not Milton’s intention. The

40 E. M. W. Tillyard, ‘Milton and the English Epic Tradition’, in Seventeenth Century Studies Presented to Sir Herbert Grierson, Oxford 1938, 211–34.

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suggestion for Paradise Regained came from one Ellwood.41 According to this theory, Paradise Lost was meant to be the prelude to a greater poem on Paradise, regained in England through the victory of Parliament.42 As I said above, there is no great interest today in Milton’s intention at the time of writing the poem, but there is a general consensus that he changed his mind completely, passing from the idea of a celebratory poem to the exact opposite. Other critics see in the poem not a surrender or withdrawal into a strait-laced theodicy but a direct involvement in the political debate.43 In this hypothesis, Satan is not, for Milton, the political hero, but the symbol of those forces that brought about the collapse of the ‘good old cause’. In short, we are back to the demonization of Cromwell. 6. From a purely theological point of view, Paradise Lost is an outright denial of Puritan predestination. In this light, Satan is less black and God less bright – indeed, a bit more ‘Satanic’. The Trinity is left in the shadows, while Milton’s heaven is ruled by the efficient partnership of a father who can talk to his son without a quarrel breaking out. On the other hand, Milton had become, or had always been, an anti-Trinitarian.44 Intermittent, very formal exchanges – sometimes mellifluous, always respectful – resolve any possible tiny difference of opinion between father and son, the former severe and implacable, the latter obedient but merciful. The council in Heaven, during which the Father explains his actions to the angelic host, gives the impression of a democratic regime. Christ is the real antagonist of Satan, and vice versa. The ideal conclusion of the story lies outside the poem: Mary and Jesus together will crush Satan (Milton uses the understatement ‘bruise’ to convey this drastic final action). The end of the poem is serenely optimistic, and anti-Calvinist: Eve is aware of her sin and her

41 The essence of the two poems is contained in the matching readings of Catholic liturgy for the first Sunday of Lent: Gen. 2, 7–9 and 3, 1–7 + Rom. 5, 12–19 + Matt. 4, 1–11. 42 Tillyard 1961, 107. 43 Cf. the volumes reviewed in TLS (2 February 1996, 4–5). 44 On English anti-Trinitarianism in Milton, cf. Hill 1977.

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responsibility in condemning humanity for centuries to come,45 and begins her exile. Adam is comforted, and literally exhilarated that from his seed the Redeemer will be born. 7. The comments I have already made on the reception of Milton tout court may be applied to Paradise Lost, too, because in the past he has been judged, almost exclusively, on the strength of this poem. The work has been attacked mainly on the basis of antithetical aesthetic convictions and moral values – in short, owing to epistemic disagreements. To the secularism prevailing in western society until very recently may be ascribed the lack of interest in the poem for the intelligentsia, especially on the Continent. In the middle of the nineteenth century the positivist Taine mocked Milton’s representation of our domesticated forebears, and their formal, polite dialogues in line with the etiquette of married life. The twentieth century and Modernism, which were sceptical and atheist (notably Empson) found great difficulty in attuning to Milton’s ideological and theological earnestness, but every time it has been the figure of Satan that has saved the day. Milton exalts ‘fighters’, so it was alleged; his portrayal of the ‘agonistes’ convinces because the poet identifies with them. On the contrary, God the Father and the Son, especially the Son, are colourless and anonymous. Apart from Satan, critics in the past have found some good things to say about Adam, and, on occasions, Eve. The opinion, first expressed by Dryden and repeated by Johnson, still carries weight: that Paradise Lost is uneven and patchy; the first two books are required reading, mainly because of Satan; the third and fourth are disappointing, mainly because of God the Father; Raphael’s account of ‘the story so far’ is too long; the farewell to Eden is sublime. At the present time, Paradise Lost does not seem to be caught up in a surge in popularity; it has little appeal for the postmodern, which has often resuscitated literary mummies thanks to remakes and various transformations, transpositions, transfusions and parodies. The poem has undergone almost no remakes for cinema or the theatre, music, cabaret or

45 Not even professional theologians have been able to explain why the Father waited 1,500 years before sending his Son into the unredeemed world.

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comics. Yet it contains the seeds of a great work of romance.46 The ‘star wars’ between angels and demons might be the basis for an SF version; a strip cartoon or Beckettian pièce might provide a platform for Eve’s flightiness, countered by the cautious stolidity of her husband. § 36. Milton VI: ‘Paradise Lost’ II. Satan’s dynamism and God’s response The first distinguishing feature of the poem is the opening long shot on Satan’s army as it lies, beaten and exhausted, on the burning lake of Hell. It may symbolize that Satan is at the heart of the poem, and is the centre of interest, and sympathy, for the poet, though tempered by the incontestable claims of theology. The first two books, in a sort of prologue, contain a detailed, in-depth study of the psychology of the demonic characters. Milton uses the overall metaphor of an army with its divisions of roles and duties according to a strict hierarchy. Satan is the commander; below him come all the others in descending order, right down to the ‘foot soldiers’. The pyramidal structure is never questioned.47 The council of war is taken from Homer, no doubt, but in Milton is coloured by the recent events of the Civil War that were still very much alive in the collective imagination. The great leader, with a mission to carry out, however evil, has an iron fist and great courage. As I have said before, there is not a little of Cromwell in this Satan. Two points should be borne in mind: regret at having forfeited Heaven and the aspiration to return; the realization on Satan’s part that he can never compete with the Almighty, but will be defeated again should a second war be fought. Yet, ‘hope springs eternal’, and not just in human breasts: the fallen angels’ hope is based on an indomitable urge to sabotage God’s plans: the war has been lost, but the defeated can still disturb and vex the Victor, and frustrate his plans; they can alleviate their pain by

46 Cf. B. Kiefer Lewalski, ‘The Genres of Paradise Lost’, in Danielson 1992, 79–95, especially 85–6. 47 Regarding the plurality of opinions, see Belial’s intervention in the war council, in which he openly declares in favour of resignation and immobilism. Critics have, of course, had a field day identifying the real, English, people behind Moloch, Mammon, Belial and Beelzebub (who persuades Satan to resume the war).

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retaliating. The war council of Book II debates the various answers to the usual revolutionary question, ‘What is to be done?’ What emerges is the fact that Milton’s Satan is essentially pure, inexhaustible energy, even in the face of certain defeat, so that the energy is in itself a victory, whatever the actual outcome of a battle might be. The opening of the poem clarifies once and for all the text’s discursive strategies. Milton initiates a diction which is characterized by his so called ‘hammer blows’; he exploits the gamut of the ‘terrible’; he heaps up apocalyptic hyperboles and facile similes involving the sun, winds and sea; he merges Hebrew mythology with Greek and Latin. In two cases he refers to facts that are disautomatizing insofar as contemporary: the ‘earth’ and the ‘garden of God’ are compared to the ‘imagined lands and regions of the moon’ seen through Galileo’s telescope, and Satan’s legions to the dead leaves by ‘the brooks / In Vallombrosa’. We are disillusioned about Milton being an auditory poet, as if often stated:48 the devils unsheathing their glinting swords is only one of the many examples of the Dantesque in Milton (though they differ in that Milton’s cosmos is unlimited and its boundaries vague, while Dante’s is more circumscribed, and his eyes pick out the smallest details). The scene of Satan’s egress from Hell is an inversion of Aeneas’ or Dante’s entry into the underworld. Satan is stopped by one who calls him ‘father’, and introduces herself as ‘Sin’; the son born from Sin rapes her, generating other hellish monsters. Milton still believes that God created the human race to take the place of the fallen angels, but with the intention of ‘settling’ them on some distant planet, to avoid ‘new broils’. Through the gates of hell, once a bridge has been built connecting it with the Earth, Sin and Death will pass on their way to wreak havoc on post-lapsarian man. Immediately outside the gates, Satan finds himself in Chaos, described in such a way as to recall the defeat and rout of the rebel angels. 2. In Books III and IV, God the Father, together with the Son,49 observes the unfolding of events, but cannot – or rather, will not – interfere: he has given man free will. But there is a way out: man will not fall by 48 DAI, vol. I, 441. 49 Milton never uses the name ‘Jesus’, but only ‘the Son’; and ‘paradise’ is always the earthly paradise of Eden. The heavenly paradise is ‘Heaven’.

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himself, but will be seduced, unlike Satan, whose freedom of choice was absolute. Contesting the doctrine of predestination, Milton repeats that God’s plan was to replace the rebel angels with an angel-like race, mankind. The harmony between Father and Son contrasts with the relationship between Sin and Death in Book II. God informs his Son that justice demands that He punish man’s sin of pride by death. The Son at once offers to die for the sake of the fallen humans. So far, so good, but for the suspicion that God could have stopped Satan, but didn’t, as if to create the premise for some huge epic event, a megagalactic battle in which the Son takes on Satan – see Paradise Regained – with this Baroque pageant, then brought to an end by the crucifixion, death, resurrection and ascension of this same Son. Vindictive and possessive, God the Father will tolerate no sharing of his creature, man. Not all of Book III is about God: halfway through, Satan is seen nearing Limbo after flying a vast distance through interstellar space towards the Earth, which he sees in the far distance, and is overcome by wonder and a sensation of dizziness. He takes the form of a cherub and lands, meets the Archangel Uriel, and asks him for information. Book IV, too, is divided between two spheres of action: in the first, Satan reconnoitres Eden and its human inhabitants; in the second, Uriel reports to Gabriel. In the first part of the book, a humanized Satan wonders whether to turn back or go on; he even seems to have a conscience!50 He persists, however, and arrives at the gates of Eden. He describes the scents of the garden, leaps over the wall, and finds himself in front of the trees of Life and of Knowledge. § 37. Milton VII: ‘Paradise Lost’ III. Man’s redemption Through Satan’s eyes, the human pair are presented, naked and innocent, at their table, surrounded by friendly animals. Satan hears Adam speak of their happiness and of the only thing they are forbidden to do, and witnesses their demonstrations of endearment. He then comes down 50

The angel, Abdiel, at first convinced by Satan to join the rebels, changes his allegiance, and returns to the army of God. Here he attempts to talk Satan into changing his mind. So he is a potential Satan, whose function is not entirely understood by DAI, vol. I, 443.

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from the tree of Life, where he was perched in the likeness of a cormorant. Eavesdropping is a typical device of the Elizabethan theatre, with the villain often hiding and listening in order to gather information that will help him to his goal. In the evening, Adam and Eve withdraw to the marriage bed, and join in sinless union. Several times Milton inveighs, in an aside, against hypocrisy: sex is no sin inside marriage. From now on there are various changes of scene: first of all, in the middle of the night, Gabriel orders his soldiers to apprehend the intruder; Satan is captured and taken to him. Book V deals entirely with the Archangel Raphael’s warning to the human pair: he tells them of Satan’s expulsion from Heaven, which the reader will remember from Book I. Before that, Eve tells of her dream, in which she has seen Satan eating the forbidden fruit. She says she woke up with a start; Adam explains that imagination often imitates reality, creating fears and sinful thoughts. The theological interrogative returns: God the Father sees what is happening and tries to stop it, knowing quite well that he cannot; he realizes he will have to resolve an even more serious situation than before to obtain the same result – to open the gates of Heaven to man; and all for what? For the ‘diabolical’ pleasure of staging some impressive theatrical action. At this point, it is difficult not to think of Shakespeare’s The Tempest: God is a kind of Prospero who will ensure a happy end to the story, but could have done it sooner. A parallel can also be seen between the two pairs of innocents, Adam and Eve, and Miranda and Ferdinand. God speaks to ‘fulfil / All justice’; that is, he carries out, dispassionately, like Pontius Pilate, what his own plan requires. Raphael is Milton’s mouthpiece when he tells Adam that God has left the pair free to choose between good and evil, distinguishing between voluntary and necessary service. From Raphael’s account we learn that the name of Lucifer has been abolished in Heaven, and that Satan rebelled because he was envious of the ‘more beloved’ Son. 2. To continue the Archangel’s account: after ejecting the rebel angels from Heaven, God created another world, and creatures to inhabit it. It seems like an arbitrary extra that He should have sent the Son to carry out the creation in six days, after which he returns to Heaven. Raphael’s analepsis continues, putting off the temptation. Adam, naïvely innocent, must be instructed as to his own creation; until then he has lived in a kind

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of blissful state of ignorance. God created the world and everything in it under the delusion that he could tie it to himself, ‘under long obedience tried’,51 and establish a binding union of earth and Heaven. Book VIII might be called ‘pleonastic’, inserted only to reach the required total of twelve. In it, Adam takes on a tone which is alien to him – that of the learned inquisitor – and ventures into quite abstruse territory; this may, however, be an example of Miltonic irony. Raphael explains patiently and, like Virgil to Dante, conjures him to ‘più non dimandare’ [‘ask no more’] about secrets that must remain so for him. There is even a certain humour here, for Raphael was absent when Adam was created, and Adam thinks he himself can fill in the missing parts of the narrative. Adam’s waking, the request for a mate, and Eve’s creation are, in fact, some of the most inspired episodes of the whole poem. The next book, the ninth, represents the climax and turning point: it is morning, and Adam accompanies Eve to the ‘easy’ tasks of the garden. He decides not to leave her alone, as he has been warned of lurking danger. Eve objects that she is quite sure of herself, and wants to prove it; Adam gives in. In what is, in effect, a scene of ordinary married life, Eve bridles at the idea that Adam should doubt her and think she might yield to temptation. She gives some anachronistic examples of female resistance, to which Adam replies that reason may deceive the will with false appearances. One of the key biblical premises that Milton does not contest is that God created woman frailer than man. Satan reappears after a long absence, and, seeing the delights he can never have, again states that he is an ‘outsider’. He targets Eve rather than Adam. When he sees Eve surrounded by uncontaminated nature, he is filled with doubt, and hesitates for a moment before pulling his evil self together. Besieged by Satan, Eve does not understand that the death threatened by the divine command is, above all, symbolic. In fact, the serpent has not died through eating the apple; he has a better life. ‘Look at me’, says the satanic snake. Eve’s reasoning is faulty, but then, she is naïve and not prepared for this. Eve’s 51

The creation by the Son is a hyperbolic show with images of storms and winds rising up from the depths. Then the Son takes a pair of compasses and draws a circle indicating the bounds of creation. The spirit breathes, and day and night are created. This is practically a paraphrase of the account in Genesis.

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soliloquy has a decidedly Elizabethan framework: she debates with herself whether to hide from Adam what she has done – and become superior to him – or share the pain. Adam’s first reaction is to wonder if God has just been pretending: would he really destroy what he has created? One of the first consequences of eating the forbidden fruit is lust: Adam and Eve go out into the fields to satisfy the novel sexual desire, and immediately after break out into recrimination and mutual blame. Remembering that he had once wanted to write of King Arthur, Milton perhaps sees Adam as a kind of Tristram, who drinks the philtre for love of Iseult. 3. God again affirms his foreknowledge of the Fall, but also his condemnation. The Son descends from Heaven, ordered by the Father to carry out the punishment once the pair have been tried. The Son, too, places the man above the woman in the hierarchy of creation, and assigns the leadership to Adam. He is, however, more merciful than the Father, and ‘disdain[s] not to begin / Thenceforth the form of servant to assume’, in the words of St Paul. The Son returns to Heaven, and Sin and Death join Satan, their great creator. Earth and Hell are now linked by a gigantic bridge to facilitate the future transport of souls. The children of Satan, Sin and Death, are sent to rule the Earth as plenipotentiaries. Satan goes back to Pandemonium, and is given a rapturous reception by his followers. The forces of evil have found a place to live; they will colonize the Earth. Satan recounts the temptation of Adam and Eve with considerable dramatic skill, playing down the future threats of the Almighty. Then the whole host of devils is transformed into hissing snakes, and, with a device worthy of Dante, a grove of apples brings forth, not sweet-smelling fruit, but dust and ashes. Adam delivers a long lament, feeling he bears the guilt of the whole of humanity, and rails against Eve, and the creation of faithless women. Subdued, Eve nobly offers to ask God to punish only her, to spare all their future offspring, while for her only suicide is left. Adam cuts a better figure because he is proactive: let us procreate, he says to her, and one of our descendants will crush the head of the serpent; we will be avenged and life afterwards will be not so hard. The last scene of the poem shows the descent of the Archangel Michael in the form of a warrior. He has come to drive the human pair out of Eden. They bewail their departure. Michael leads Adam to the top of a hill and reels off an endless

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list of distant and remote places, to give an idea of the dimensions of the planet God has created. Adam is shown the consequences of his original sin on posterity. This is another Dantesque moment: from the top of a hill a ‘Virgilian’ Archangel reveals the future to Adam, and makes a prophecy. History as told in the Bible is acted out in synthesis. From Cain and Abel, and Noah’s Ark, to Abraham and Joshua. At the end, Adam is reminded that it is his sin that has brought about the dissociation of reason and liberty. The sting in the tail is that, once the apostles are dead, they will be succeeded by ‘wolves’, who will bring with them avarice and ambition; truth will be corrupted by superstition, and secular power will merge with the spiritual until the final, purifying Day of Judgement. § 38. Milton VIII: ‘Paradise Regained’. The new Adam Paradise Regained (1671), in four books,52 and Paradise Lost may be seen as yet another of those frequent antithetical pairings in Milton, like ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’; this is not just a linguistic or conceptual antithesis, but a theological and eschatological one, too. Milton focuses on the eternal, all-out battle between Satan and Jesus, as we have seen. The gospels, in particular that of Luke, provide the narrative material of the three temptations in the desert. The suspicion I have mentioned before as being latent in Paradise Lost now emerges in full force: in Book III of this second epic, Satan accuses the Father of seeking glory for himself by exacting adoration, obedience and praise from the beings he has created for this very purpose. This suspicion, is, however, quashed by Jesus who argues that God asks only for gratitude from his creatures, whom he has made out of his goodness. So the temptation scene in Paradise Lost re-appears, transformed: Jesus is Adam (and Eve) put to the test. In the middle of the second book, the sumptuous banquet stands for the forbidden fruit, which Jesus does not taste. Several times he speaks of the ‘holy king’ who never thinks of himself; worldly fame is worthless, and the great figures of the Bible have more glory in Heaven than the warriors of Greece and Rome. Satan’s tone seems to change, however, when he begs Jesus, while he was

52

Lewalski 1966 writes at length on previous four-book short epics.

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more self-assured and arrogant with Adam. Satan is shown to be totally powerless, relying on Jesus’ taking pity on him and giving him a second chance. In the end he is almost comical, like a soldier who has run out of ammunition, and admits it. 2. Both Satan and Milton find it impossible to say no to a council: here, the Arch-fiend again complains that Jesus has been favoured above him. Satan is amazed that the fabled Messiah should be similar in countenance to the Father; he seems a new Adam, which, in fact, he is. God announces a second test for man, but already knows that Satan’s threat will be foiled, and he will be driven back down to Hell. While still a boy, Jesus realized who he was by reading the Bible. The reader of Paradise Regained may be pleasantly deceived when a venerable shepherd – Satan in disguise – meets Jesus in the desert and asks him who he is, while the apostles are looking for him and his mother worries. When the first temptation fails, Satan holds another council, in which Belial suggests sexual temptation. Satan rejects this impatiently, and yet Belial has given voice to a theme that will be further developed by the Decadents: the love life, or sex life, of Christ with Mary Magdalene, or that of John the Baptist with Salome. In the second temptation (Satan takes the form of a courtier), Jesus refuses gold and precious stones, and draws the portrait of the model earthly king as one who acts only for the public good. This second temptation spills over into Book III, where Satan continues obstinately to offer Jesus worldly power and fame: he might even, says Satan, become the liberator of Israel from the Roman yoke. Finally, he takes him to the top of a mountain and points out the richest and most famous places in human history in the plain below them, where armies march in glinting, clanging rows. The third book ends in medias res; Book IV resumes with the scene on the mountain top. As through a telescope, Jesus sees Rome, caput mundi, an empire without heirs, and a feeble emperor. Satan continues to offer earthly principalities; Jesus resists. Then he shows him Athens, the symbol of ancient philosophy, which Jesus judges far inferior to the wisdom of the Bible.53 After a final attempt in the form of terrifying dreams and a huge thunderstorm, comes

53

‘The humanist in Milton has succumbed to the Puritan’ (GSM, 168).

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Satan’s contemptuous invitation to Jesus to throw himself down from the pinnacle on which Satan has placed him, and Jesus’ lapidary reply: ‘Tempt not the Lord thy God’. 3. Why is Paradise Regained judged to be inferior to Paradise Lost by just about everyone except its author? The first reason is that Christ is by definition and by nature incorruptible; he never doubts, never budges, so there can be no repeat of the nail-biting duel between Adam and Satan. The second reason is that Paradise Regained simmers but never boils: it contains no sensational coup de théâtre. Satan has become a ‘poor devil’, with none of the air of mystery and menace of the first epic; and Jesus has been despoiled of his divinity and subjected to kenosis. Milton’s style is drier, plainer, and less magniloquent – we have to wait until the beginning of the fourth book for a simile, as if the author had just remembered that this figure of speech has proved invaluable in Paradise Lost, and so he inserts two more straight away for good measure. Besides, the clash between Jesus and the Evil One is conducted on an academic and doctoral level: they argue mainly over theoretical problems, debate the various civilizations of history, and weigh up different ideas of culture (Roman decadence, the limits of Greek culture, which is surpassed by the Hebrew). In short, there is no real dramatic struggle. § 39. Milton IX: ‘Samson Agonistes’ Milton called this ‘a dramatic poem’, evidently to emphasize that it was not intended for performance, especially at a time when drama was raising again its head by putting on plays of questionable morality. Samson Agonistes is not divided, but is one long act consisting of 1,758 lines in various metres. The action takes place within the statutory twenty-four hours, and the scene is practically unchanged throughout.54 Samson is blind, and a

54 There is still no agreement on whether Samson, published with Paradise Regained in 1671, is really his last work, or whether it belongs to some period before the two epics, as suggested by the occasional use of rhyme. It is worth remembering the famous passage in Areopagitica (1644) where Milton pictures England rising up ‘like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks […] kindling her undazzled eyes at the full midday beam’. Samson also echoes, up to almost the very end of the

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prisoner of the Philistines. A chorus of friends, including his father, come to listen to his lament and commiserate with him. Faced with Dalila and the boasting Harapha, Samson gives rein to recriminations, recollections, verbal attacks, dreams and fantasies. The biblical climax is recounted by a messenger, in the style of Seneca. In this, Milton’s last work, Samson is an alter ego: behind, or within him, we can make out the author of the sonnet on his blindness, who protests against God, but in the end accepts his misfortune. God, however, remains incomprehensible in the unequal distribution of his gifts. The chorus points to Samson’s double imprisonment – his chains and his lack of sight. Once again, woman is the temptress, and is execrated, just as Adam blames Eve when he learns she has been seduced by Satan. Samson has had two wives, as against Milton’s three, and the second has conquered him by means of her sensuality. Of course, here the marriage relationship is different to the one between Adam and Eve, but the common denominator is that neither reflects Milton’s ideal of harmony between the two partners. In Samson, there are echoes of Satan scorned and frustrated, and, at the same time, of Christ in Gethsemane, weighed down by his fate and almost unwilling to accept it. Samson Agonistes is considered by some to be Milton’s masterpiece; Dr Johnson expressed doubts, and today it is generally seen as a mixture of sublime dramatic verse and parts that are tired and dull. Samson’s first speech, in which he commiserates with himself by means of harrowing anaphoras, is great poetry, and we cannot but agree with Johnson in finding the epilogue, too, highly effective: Samson exits, summoned to Dagon’s feast to be the sport of the Philistines; a roar shakes the sky. While his father, Manoa, expresses his hope that Samson will be freed, a messenger appears and tells the astonished bystanders of the hero’s last, self-destructive exploit.55 The play loses somewhat in the furious quarrel between Samson and Dalila, complete with colloquialisms, which is on

55

poem, the grieving meditation of the sonnet on Milton’s blindness, where the poet, who ‘stands and waits’ curbs his remonstrances, and accepts, however, unwillingly, his total loss of sight, which he suffered in 1652. Though Milton in no way accuses Samson of suicide. The poem enjoyed a new vogue after the attack on the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001.

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the same level as the argument between Adam and Eve. Dalila goes on and on, in order to defend her honour in the eyes of her fellow-Philistines, claiming she married Samson only to neutralize him; she compares herself to Jael who thrust a sword into the forehead of General Sisera, a simile which was to reappear in the poem ‘March 1821’ by Alessandro Manzoni. Harapha enters and challenges Samson. The only significance of this figure is to give a third-party voice to one aspect of Samson’s mental torment: his God has apparently abandoned him. § 40. Minor poets up to 1660 Milton left no heirs and founded no school. Mid-seventeenth-century and Restoration poetry can boast imitators and lookalikes of the Cavalier and Metaphysical, as well as of Anglican and Catholic religious poets, like Herbert, Donne and Crashaw. Poets who also happened to be soldiers could look to Lovelace and Suckling for inspiration. Likewise no school of Marvell arose, and Puritan poetry – almost a contradiction in terms – is on the whole non-existent. Others looked to the past and tried their hand at neo-Platonic philosophical poetry; some turned out yet more imitations of the Faerie Queene. The occasional poet did both: Sir Francis Kynaston (1587–1642) is the author of a Latin Chaucer (1642), as well as a masque full of Spenserian echoes, and a few poems that rival Carew in their blatant Caroline paganism. Aurelian Townshend (1583?–1642 or 1643) wrote masques that were performed at court, and a poem in which he enthused at having heard the queen sing. That William Cartwright (1611–1643), playwright and author of complimentary verse, should find an admirer in Coleridge explains why modern critics have revived some of these minor poets and not others: in other words, if they were appreciated by great poets, then they must be worth reading. It helps if they have some exploit to their name. Sidney Godolphin (1610–1643), who died young while fighting for the king, wrote love poems that are almost comparable to those by Lovelace. He also translated Virgil. Unfortunately, he is remembered mainly because Hobbes dedicated his Leviathan to his brother Francis Godolphin, then governor of the Isles of Scilly. The prose and poetry of John Hoskins (1566–1638) were for centuries attributed to Jonson and Donne respectively. The Catholic William Habington

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(1605–1653) glorifies chaste love, and sings of the bride in a Castara published in 1634. Henry More (1614–1687), a Cambridge Platonist, as a poet borrowed extensively from Spenser, and also wrote various tracts with strange, impenetrable titles, redeemed by lively portraits of contemporary theologians and divines. 2. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–1673 or 1674), and Katherine Philips (1632–1664) were two outstanding, multi-faceted literary figures, who may, in a way, be considered proto-feminists. The former was much admired by Lamb and Virginia Woolf,1 who hailed her as a courageous fighter against current female stereotypes and against the widespread opinion, exemplified by Pepys, that it was unbecoming and ridiculous for a well-born lady to reveal herself in poetry and to soil her hands with prose. She acquired a reputation for her cutting tongue, and stood out for the eccentricity of her way of dressing. Her behaviour, too, was often calculated to shock. Her most readable book is a lively biography of her husband, the Duke, and a General, thirty years her senior. They had met in Paris, where he was in exile (later compensated at the Restoration). Before that, in 1653, she had published a book of poetical and philosophical ‘fantasies’, containing also scientific essays of great eccentricity. As a philosopher, she was ambitious and presumptuous, as an author, prolific and varied.2 Her verses are run-of-the-mill, but clear, as are her prose prefaces, in which she expounds questions that were to prove vital for the birth and development of women’s literature. However, Katherine Philips is probably the most important female poet of any period up to the date of her death. The daughter of a merchant, she first debuted with poems that were included in Henry Vaughan’s first collection. She translated Corneille into rhymed verse. She came from a Presbyterian family, but became a supporter of the king. By the time she died, she was famous, and praised by all the most authoritative critics. The first edition of her complete poems was published in 1667, most of them being addressed to two women with whom she had a neo-Platonic lesbian relationship. For many years it was 1 2

‘The Duchess of Newcastle’, TCR, First Series, 78–87. Her utopian novel, The Blazing World, is, quite frankly, a narcissistic hotchpotch.

§ 41. Bacon

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thought that she held a salon frequented by Cowley, Vaughan, and Jeremy Taylor the preacher, to whom she was ‘the matchless Orinda’. This hypothesis is now discredited, as the salon in question was actually only a series of literary exchanges. Her poetry, arranged in a cycle with a story, follows the tradition of aliases, or poetic names; but in the sonnet sequences of 1590 and beyond, Delia and Celia and other pseudonyms were used by a male lover to address his female counterpart; in Phillips’s poetry, Orinda speaks passionately to Lucasia – an echo of Lucasta – and Rosania, who represents the historian Aubrey’s cousin Mary. § 41. Bacon* After William of Ockham, and almost 300 years of silence, an Englishman, Francis Bacon (1561–1626), steps into the limelight in the theatre of European philosophy and leaves his mark. The reverence with which he is treated on the Continent, however, is not matched in his home country: the English were the first to dampen the enthusiasm for his achievements, and still today he is praised grudgingly, with emphasis laid on his limitations – human, moral, ideological, even heuristic, not to mention the purely literary.1 Bacon, his detractors say, was an abject human being, guilty of a political crime that at the time was judged to be the worst possible, and causes even greater indignation nowadays. Furthermore, his philosophy ‘is in many ways unsatisfactory’,2 and is often *

The Oxford Francis Bacon, various eds, 15 vols, Oxford, which replaces the worthy nineteenth-century edition by J. Spedding (14 vols, London 1857–1864), has been appearing since 1996 (7 vols published up to 2012) in non-chronological order. The following are a few examples of modern literary criticism on Bacon: N. Orsini, Bacone e Machiavelli, Genova 1936; B. Vickers, Francis Bacon and Renaissance Prose, Cambridge 1968, and Francis Bacon, Harlow 1978; L. Jardine, Francis Bacon, Discovery and the Art of Discourse, London 1974; J. C. Briggs, Francis Bacon and the Rhetoric of Nature, Cambridge 1989; L. Jardine and A. Stewart, Hostage to Fortune: The Troubled Life of Francis Bacon, London 1998.

1

Leibniz and the Encyclopaedists (Voltaire, D’Alembert) thought him ‘matchless’, and Kant took the epigraph of his Critique of Pure Reason from the Instauratio. From Goethe to Nietzsche, German reaction to Bacon is benevolent, if not enthusiastic. HWP, 526.

2

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flagrantly out-dated. His aesthetics is plagued by obstinacy and error, and short-sighted, to say the least, for not having realized the potential of English as a literary – and scientific – language. It is true that his Essays are a monument to English prose, but, everyone agrees, Montaigne’s will bear comparison, different as they are. Everything else by Bacon – except his philosophical treatises and one work of history3 – that attempts to be inventive and adventurous is a failure. Before embarking on, not a defence, but an objective examination of Bacon, it must be remembered that he was forty-two when Elizabeth died, and that in 1626, the year of his death, many of the writers I have discussed above were still children. Bacon’s place is here because his works, all published in the first thirty years of the seventeenth century, have little of the Elizabethan, and look at ‘the thing as it really is’. He occupies a niche carved between Elizabethan abundance and extravagance, and the rich convoluted style of Burton and Browne, which died with the dawn of Augustanism – the latter was just an off-shoot of Bacon’s prose. In purely literary terms, Bacon is the author of two works of capital importance, at least in intention if not actual result (the second work): these are, a collection of essays on various subjects, and a new ‘utopia’ that draws on More’s Utopia and provided the model for eighteenth-century imitations. Since Bacon was also a poet, though not a very good one, this fact gave rise to the preposterous theory that he was the real author of Shakespeare’s plays, Shakespeare being almost the same age as Bacon. 2. Bacon’s criminal record is not as bad as Waller’s, but he was no saint. Consequently he has had bad press, as is seen by the sometimes extremely negative comments handed down through the centuries. His political and moral code was based on his declared Machiavellianism, which was his ruin in a century like the seventeenth when Machiavelli was unfashionable and Il Principe considered a pernicious work of mischief.4 The son 3 4

A study of the reign of Henry VII (1622), by far the best historical work to the date of writing, after More’s history of Richard III (Volume 1, § 39.2). On Bacon and Machiavelli, and Machiavelli and Harvey, cf. N. Orsini in bibliography, and the distinctions made in PMI, 106–9.

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of Elizabeth’s Keeper of the Seal, member of Parliament, and counsellor under Elizabeth, Bacon was, surprisingly, appointed to the prosecution in the trial of the Earl of Essex, who had been his protector before the plot to overthrow the queen and seize power. This ‘betrayal’ was to dog him: Bertrand Russell recalls that in Elizabeth and Essex Lytton Strachey paints him as a ‘monster of ingratitude’, though Russell allows him the mitigating circumstance that ‘continued loyalty to him would have been treasonable’. Under James I, Bacon became Attorney General, then Lord Chancellor, and was covered with honours and titles. In 1621, however, he was charged with corruption and tried. He confessed, adding, unconvincingly, that the illicit payments made to him had never influenced any decision he made. He was barred in perpetuity from holding public office, fined 40,000 pounds, and sent to the Tower. The two latter punishments were condoned or changed, while the exclusion from public service lasted until his death, so that he spent the rest of his days on his country estate, writing. Russell’s debunking closes with a reference to the terrible irony of his death – the inventor of experimental science died because of an experiment: he is said to have caught pneumonia when trying to stuff a chicken with snow – to invent, in other words, the refrigerator. This anecdote is a humorous confirmation of the motto of Baconian speculative thought, that ‘knowledge is power’. The ‘natural philosopher’ benefits society through his discoveries and inventions aimed at controlling the forces of nature;5 knowledge is not an end in itself, but has a pragmatic aim. Taine, as a positivist, hailed Bacon as a benefactor of mankind, and saw in him a precursor of Bentham. For Bacon, knowledge is no longer to be sought in the Platonic world of ideas, or the partial and fallacious inductions of Aristotle. The existence of God can be demonstrated through reason, but all other theological truths are revealed, he maintained, indicating the possibility of two kinds of truth. Like Pierre Bayle during the Enlightenment, he extolled the ‘triumph of faith’, which is to say, he was amazed that faith managed to survive in spite of all the proofs against it put forward by reason. Everything was to be

5

Bacon believed that control over nature was lost owing to the Fall.

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explained on the basis of the law of cause and effect. Aristotle and his followers had not ignored or underestimated induction, but theirs had been an ‘induction by simple enumeration’.6 Bacon’s method entailed precise observation and measurement leading to the identification of successive degrees of overall applicability of physical laws, so as to obtain ever greater margins of safety by means of supplementary systems of guarantee.7 His great reform of learning, Instauratio magna, originally conceived in six books, was never completed. He wrote the pars destruens, or rather, the status quaestionis, but only a preface to the intermediate and final parts of the project. Though not intended as such, Advancement of Learning8 (1605) is the first part of this opus magnum, and is an attack on the medieval logic and rhetoric, formalism and nominalism still taught in universities (‘the degeneration of knowledge’). He also takes issue with pseudo-sciences like alchemy and astrology. The second complete volume, Novum Organum (1620), in Latin, lays out his experimental method – the title is an obvious allusion to Aristotle’s Organon – and contains the famous theory of the four idols. The effects and repercussions of Bacon’s reform were not felt for fifty years; in fact, the king, to whom the work was dedicated, was not impressed by it, remarking that it was like divine beatitude – beyond understanding. According to Taine, Cowley thought of Bacon as a kind of Moses, who never set foot in the Promised Land. Future scholars were to criticize Bacon for spending too much time collecting public offices and titles and not enough on his studies. Many objections have been raised in the context of Bacon’s empiricism: he had no time for mathematics; above all, he was an enemy of deduction, which, for positivists, is complementary to induction, because it is a preliminary for the classification of phenomena,

6 7 8

Cf. in HWP, 527–8, the perceptive demonstration of how this logical procedure works. The cognitive process ends with the discovery of what Bacon calls ‘the forms of things’, a mysterious expression that brings to mind the haecceitas of Duns Scotus. Translated into Latin and revised in 1623 as De Augmentis Scientiarum. It is not clear why Bacon decided, in 1605, to write in English rather than Latin, contrary to his convictions.

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which is in turn based on a hypothesis of relevance. On Bacon’s other shortcomings, Bertrand Russell is drastic: ‘He missed most of what was being done in science in his day’; he was indifferent to Copernicus and Kepler, and ignorant of Vesalius’ anatomy and Harvey’s theory of the circulation of the blood. Harvey joined the chorus of detractors, saying he wrote about philosophy ‘like a Lord Chancellor’.9 3. The first edition of Essays (1597) contained ten reflections written in a terse, aphoristic style, made more flowing, and enriched with quotations and interpolations, in the following two editions, 1612 and 1625, in which the total number of essays was raised to thirty-eight (1612) and fifty-eight (1625). What has become known as ‘the Baconian style’ – anti-Baroque, anti-Ciceronian, anti-Senecan, and vaguely euphuistic (though very different to Thomas Browne’s) – was, for the author, a kind of second best: Bacon wrote mostly in Latin, and translated into Latin works originally written in English, like New Atlantis. The style of the Essays is the chance coinage of a concise, effective language that looks ahead to the aseptic clarity recommended by the Royal Society. Tacitus is present, syntactically, in the short, balanced phrases, and, stylistically, in the frequent use of rhetorical figures like anaphora, epistrophe, antimetabole and climax. The essay ‘Of Studies’ can be taken as an illustration both of the stylistic differences between the three versions, and of a recurrent ternary structure which serves to classify, modify, or contradict opening statements: ‘Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability’. The structure and rhythm is repeated continuously to the very end. Compared to Montaigne, who always seems to be speaking about himself, Bacon announces the early eclipse of the author, who withdraws to the wings without a whisper, and abstains from giving the slightest scrap of autobiographical information. In his Essays, Bacon transfers his experimental philosophy onto a literary plane: he lists situations and from them extracts the laws governing human behaviour. He collects data from the observation of reality in order to make generalizations, as can be seen by expressions like ‘it is often seen’ or ‘it is 9

Bacon believed that the left and right ventricles were in communication through small holes in a diaphragm. This error was corrected by Harvey in 1628.

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worthy the observing’. The titles of the essays refer to concrete phenomena and abstract virtues and vices, as well as to actions pertaining to work or leisure (gardening, negotiations). Bacon sometimes begins by stating the final result of his observations, and postulates human categories – for example, bad husbands or important personages – without telling us how he came to establish them and what logical procedure led him to make his generalization. In line with his experimental method and his search for truth, Bacon constructs a ‘dispensary’ of advice and admonitions; his verbs are therefore often in the imperative. It is implicitly understood that the writer has, or imagines, an audience, which he addresses, and to whom he dispenses instructions on the art of living, rather like Polonius, and at time just as obvious. His interlocutor is, however, always a candidate for public office, or the higher levels of the professions, or he is a cultured, though young, diplomat or courtier. It is obvious, therefore, that the advice meted out in the Essays is practical, and the traditional ethical code is often contradicted, and becomes unstable. Advice on religious or other spiritual concerns is non-existent, so that Saintsbury found in them a hint of philistinism.10 The New Atlantis (1624, published unfinished in 1627, perhaps a response to Campanella’s Città del sole [The City of the Sun]), tells of a group of English sailors, lost in the Pacific, who land on an island named Bensalem.11 Here, a ‘house of Solomon’ is a meeting place for all those who dedicate themselves to the improvement of mankind by implementing the criteria of experimental research, exploiting natural resources by ingenious means (too ingenious: some of the methods used are simply too fanciful and unproductive). The New Atlantis is yet another version of the perfect state, based on harmony, religious tolerance,12 and the family.

10 11 12

SAI, 379. Salem is the town of Melchizedek. In a sceptic like Bacon, the harmony that reigns in Bensalem between reason and religion may be suspected of masking insincere praise for the English crown.

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§ 42. Burton* The Anatomy of Melancholy is one of those books that outlive the author, in part because we know little of the Robert Burton (1577–1640) who wrote it, except for a few summary, general, external data; but above all because Burton, who took twenty years to write it, might well have exclaimed, à la Flaubert, ‘l’Anatomie c’est moi’. What other books, not counting the great epics of Proust and Joyce,1 contain, like this, the author’s whole life? Burton left his native Leicestershire to study at Oxford. He graduated and was ordained a minister of the Church of England, then spent the rest of his life as a member of Christ Church, and became an assiduous presence in the Bodleian Library, which had just been inaugurated.

*

The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. A. R. Shilleto and A. H. Bullen, 3 vols, London 1893, 1896, 1903 and 1923, New York 1973, an excellent edition with invaluable index of names, is joined today by the one edited by J. B. Bamborough, T. C. Faulkner, N. B. Kiesling and R. L. Blair, 4 vols, Oxford 1989–2000. Malinconia d’amore, Italian translation by A. Brilli and F. Marucci, with foreword (7–25) by A. Brilli, Milano 1981; only the preface ‘To the Reader’, wrongly entitled Anatomia della malinconia, was translated by G. Franci, with a scholarly introduction (7–43, originally published 1962) by J. Starobinski, Venezia 1983, 1994. L. Babb, Sanity in Bedlam: A Study of Robert Burton’s ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’, East Lansing, MI 1959, Westport, CT 1977; J.-R. Simon, Robert Burton (1577–1640) et l’Anatomie de la mélancolie, Paris 1964; M. O’Connell, Robert Burton, Boston, MA 1986; E. P. Vicari, The View from Minerva’s Tower: Learning and Imagination in ‘The Anatomy of Melancholy’, Toronto 1989; G. Hill’s review, ‘Keeping to the Middle Way’, in TLS (23 December 1994, 3–6), is practically an essay on Burton, albeit rather digressive; S. Shirilan, Robert Burton and the Transformative Powers of Melancholy, Farnham 2015.

1 Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, another work that was twenty years in the making, and a ‘work in progress’ like Burton’s, appeared in 1939 in the tercentenary (minus a year) of the fifth edition of the Anatomy, published in 1638. Self-depreciation is present in both, in the form of clever, fantastic, picturesque synonyms of the work in hand (like Burton’s ‘this cento out of divers writers’, or ‘this confused company of notes’). Starobinski 1983, 11, defines Burton’s Anatomy a polyglot work or ‘banquet of Sardanapalus’, evoking the feast of languages that characterizes Joyce’s two masterpieces: he includes (20, n. 22) a poem by Beckett that begins with a literal quotation of Burton’s description of Democritus. The closest twentieth-century equivalent, in my opinion, is Robert Graves’s The White Goddess (Volume 7, § 69.3).

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His only other work, thematically linked to the Anatomy, is a play in Latin, Philosophaster,2 performed in 1617. It has been mooted that Burton himself suffered from ‘melancholy’, having been born in the sign of Saturn; or that he was ‘cyclothymic’, and that he objectified and exorcized his suffering by writing about it. Or maybe not: rumours said he committed suicide.3 It is natural to imagine him as someone like Browning’s ‘grammarian’ who suffered the consequences of a life he himself had chosen, who repressed his instincts, and, above all, had condemned himself to a life of celibacy. Traces of misogyny, a Swiftian obsession with retention, evacuation and menstruation, bouts of disgust – they all speak loud. The Anatomy verifies the proverb medice, cura te ipsum. But it is also true that Burton had the brilliant idea of saying everything possible on what was wrong with the England of his century or at least of his day – the reign of James I. At the same time, everything for Burton was melancholy, and he tended to see all of human history sub specie melancholiae. It is useful at this point to look at the etymology and meaning of the two words of the title. Anatomy: one thinks immediately of those of ‘wit’ of Lyly, or of the ‘absurdity’ of Nashe. The word, borrowed from the world of medicine,4 was fashionable, and many writers had used it. From this seventeenth-century use, and abuse, of the term comes the twentieth-century spate of ‘anatomies’ – like the famous critical work by Northrop Frye – to indicate a treatise organized and subdivided into numbered parts, sections, subsections, chapters and paragraphs. In the seventeenth century, ‘melancholy’, in its turn, was not a vague state of mind, but a disease that led to madness; indeed, the 2

3 4

An Andalusian, Desiderius, founds a university in Osuna, and invites the scholars of Europe. Various charlatans arrive, amongst whom an alchemist, perhaps inspired by Jonson’s comedy, a Jesuit, a poetaster, and a ‘theologaster’ (nouns ending in the derogatory ‘–aster’ were rife in Jacobean drama, as were those ending in ‘–ix’). In Burton’s play, the false scholars are unmasked, and true philosophy triumphs. This would explain another rumour, that he predicted the day, month and year of his death. The first partition of the Anatomy ends on a note of understanding for those who commit suicide. In the ninth of his Devotions Donne, who uses the term in ‘An Anatomy of the World’, applies it to the examination of conscience: ‘I have cut up mine Anatomy, dissected myself, and they are gon to read upon me’.

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two terms may be considered almost synonyms with the same range of meaning.5 Melancholy shatters the personality and paralyzes action. The only positive side, especially in cases of love melancholy, is that it may ennoble a human being. A survey of drama contemporary with Burton, like the one carried out by Vanna Gentili,6 shows how often melancholics appear as characters. Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Milton’s Satan may be seen as the two poles. Hamlet hesitates, and all his plans fail; for ontological reasons, Milton’s Satan is possessed by a dynamic melancholy. The condition is not exactly the opposite of euphoria, but Traherne could be taken as the counterpart of the religious melancholy typified by Vaughan. Milton, too, presents a bi-polarity in ‘Il Penseroso’, which may have been inspired by the poetic epigraph of Burton’s Anatomy, and in ‘L’Allegro’. It is a well-known fact that John Ford, the Jacobean dramatist, had read the Anatomy of Melancholy, and borrowed heavily from it. So melancholy is a widespread seventeenth-century archetype in need of a theorizer, organizer, or, if you like, an ‘anatomizer’. A brief history of this pathology, with its many reflections in literature, would have to begin with the medieval ‘sloth’; after the seventeenth, comes a century untouched by the condition, if we except Swift; melancholy again becomes fashionable with the Romantics, and, later, is the ‘spleen’ of Decadent writers, Oblomov’s hypochondria, the alienation of the twentieth century and the depression of the twenty-first. 2. Burton wrote in English only because his publisher insisted on it, in what was one of the first examples of ‘marketing’ (Burton himself wanted to write in Latin). Sales of the book were high, but, as there was no copyright law at the time, Burton saw little of the proceeds of the five editions that appeared in quite rapid succession. The first, in 1621, was followed by four more in 1624, 1628, 1633, and 1638. The original intention of writing in Latin survives, surreptitiously, in the bilingual,

5 6

Starobinski 1983, 42. La recita della follia. Funzioni dell’insania nel teatro dell’età di Shakespeare, Torino 1978. About 100 examples from contemporary drama are examined in this book. Naturally, Marston’s ‘Malcontent’ stands out.

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sometimes trilingual text (English, Latin and Greek).7 Any great book, any ‘book of life’, will develop through several versions. Burton worked on the Anatomy in a manically concentric way. It was republished because there was a demand for it; it had become popular and people liked it. It reappeared, after the predictable, eighteenth-century eclipse, with Johnson and Sterne; the latter plagiarized parts of it after he discovered in himself an affinity with Burton. Lamb, too, wrote a Burtonian pastiche.8 Keats used him for ‘Lamia’ and, more obviously, for the ‘Ode to Melancholy’. Coleridge, Southey and Byron were all admirers of the Anatomy. Up to the Romantic period, Burton’s book was considered a bottomless well, a container, a ragbag collection of ideas, with quotations from all of 1,250 authors, many of them obscure medieval philosophers, others famous contemporaries of Burton. The Anatomy, therefore, was received, and read, as a pleasant, though disorganized compilation by an eccentric belated humanist, who seems to be incapable of sifting and sorting his material. More and more, he forgets where he is and what exactly he is doing; he lumps together references to important, authoritative authors and others that are insignificant and banal. So it is not so much a book, as a book of books. In the early twentieth century William Osler9 found that the Anatomy was, instead, a textbook of psychiatry, with all the trappings of the scientific method. Osler’s thesis was short-lived. In Burton we find the same problems as in Thomas Browne: to what extent are they ‘scientists’ as opposed to literary authors writing about science and pseudo-science? Burton goes far beyond Bacon in his ignorance or misunderstanding of issues which were at that very time being debated by ‘real scientists’. It is no use scoffing at a text that presumed to be scientific, and employing a method that would destroy even Dante, listing Burton’s howlers in the light of future, or even contemporary science. Burton anticipates the method of modern medicine in its stages of aetiology, prognosis (symptoms), and therapy. He might seem to be a trail-blazer, but he is not: in his aetiology he leans too much towards the supernatural – diseases are 7 8 9

Cf. the excellent comments by L. Sampietro, in MAR, vol. I, 711–13. § 224.2. Cf. CHI, vol. VI, 245.

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the work of devils, or witches with their spells and curses. In therapy, he is no forerunner either: he has only two remedies – always be busy and active, and avoid solitude. So he cannot rightly be called a thinker as such, but a man of letters. 3. By presenting himself to the reader as Democritus Junior, Burton initiates his operation of dismantling, varying and ‘undulating’ the objectivity of the scientific treatise. I use the word ‘undulate’ because Burton is not Bacon, who withdraws from the scene, disappearing into pure objectivity; he is more like Montaigne, and speaks to and of himself. The reader is often reminded that he is being addressed by the author, who leads the way, pointing out the landmarks, but just as often confessing he has lost his way in some digression or other; then he throws up his hands and returns to the subject. Another of Burton’s techniques is discontinuity, the interruption of the abstract, precise style of the scientific treatise by digressions and anecdotes. In his discussion of love melancholy, Burton becomes a novelist ante litteram, creating quite sharply defined characters and scenes, and retelling examples of neurosis from the literature of all ages. Mutatis mutandis, another author comes to mind, whom no one, not even Burton himself, quotes: tri-lingual Gower, who 300 years earlier had made his own compilation and called it Confessio Amantis. The time difference between the two explains why Gower has been forgotten and Burton is still read. The Anatomy is the last medieval ‘summa’, on the one hand anachronistic and impossible, on the other decidedly modern, with its ubiquitous relativism, and the sensation of being on a baroque, or manneristic, conceptual roller-coaster, capable of overturning all of a sudden – hence an effect of uncertainty, mobility, anxiety and precariousness.10 The reader witnesses the mimesis of a learned academic debate in which all the sources, and their authors, are present, and

10

The ingenious but far-fetched explanation by Starobinski 1983 is that Burton seeks and believes, unlike Democritus, who laughs alone, and is a non-melancholic nihilist (34). However, the utopia that Burton presents in his address to the reader – in which the disordered world is set aright – bears the signs of this very melancholy, as can be seen, according to Starobinski, by the pervading idea of ‘management’ and the presence of supervisors very like More’s syphogrants.

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have their say. Burton intervenes in the discussion; in fact he leads and orchestrates it. He weaves his blanket, unceasingly zigzagging from some hoary classic to yesterday’s gossip, from Greek mythology, and ancient history, including the mysterious Orient, to the events of contemporary life. All of these voices he controls with formidable skill, and the reader is surprised when, towards the end of the book, he finds Burton referring to a quotation by someone, and admitting, with false candour, ‘I know not what philosopher he was’. In the third part, especially, he becomes a kind of film director or editor of images, or flashes: his is verbal cinema, composed of lightning episodes evoked and re-created, various stories of licit and illicit love, seduction, and mad, head-over-heels falling in love. The essence of the Anatomy, however, lies in its unique style, an invention with no predecessors, and no followers, apart from Joyce. The publisher who insisted on English being the language used may be considered a coauthor of genius: if Burton had had his way, the Anatomy of Melancholy would have been left for centuries, gathering dust on the shelves of some library, practically inaccessible to future generations, like the scores of medieval and Renaissance treatises written in that language. Burton’s new language is a continuous interplay of English, Latin and Greek, conjuring up the image of the great Baroque organ, the instrument for which Bach wrote music: the discourse develops, passing from the upper keyboard to the lower and back again, with the addition of a third melodic line assigned to the pedal. 4. The introductory verses to the treatise describe its origin in terms that might be used by a lover to the lady who is fleeing him: Burton speaks of his ‘sweet’ but also ‘bitter melancholy’. It becomes clear that at least two of the three main prose writers of the seventeenth century, Burton and Browne, had fixations (Browne’s was the quincunx).11 They belong to the number of those men and women who have sworn lifelong allegiance to some overriding passion, some odd fetish, or idol, or mental deformation. From the outside, the Anatomy stands out clearly in its Byzantine structure, because Burton obviates a medieval-style labyrinthine, and confusing, 11

§ 43.

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construction by inserting detailed synoptic tables of the subjects dealt with. It is also true that Burton is carried away by sudden urges, and often digresses and transgresses, as I have said before. The three volumes, which in the edition by Shillito and Bullen number 1,300 pages, can be subdivided into four blocks: a long preface, prologue and apology to the reader of more than 100 pages, followed by three ‘partitions’, each occupying one volume. These ‘partitions’ are in turn divided into sections, ‘members’, and subsections. Much of what Burton says in his address to the reader, which he signs with the name of Democritus Junior, is paradoxical: the market is full of all kinds of books, and yet Burton writes a short encyclopaedia. Another leading paradox is dizzyingly Baroque, a Baroque dislocation of the axis, or discordia concors, most visible in the theatre – the inversion of the relation between wisdom and folly. It is no coincidence that Burton uses the metaphor of the world as theatre, indeed as a Shakespearean ‘comedy of errors’. From halfway through the address to the reader, Burton launches into an apocalyptic vision of a confused, chaotic, crumbling world. The very measurement of wisdom goes mad, and even the wisest man, like Socrates, may be judged a fool. Yet, all of a sudden, his country is praised while the rest of the cosmos precipitates. This is the first of many cases of the terrified closing of abysses that Burton himself has opened. The first partition, in fact, contains the following two as well, and starts by declaring the post-lapsarian state of mankind: no human being is totally sound, and melancholy is an incurable disease that can only be assuaged by various countermeasures. After examining the causes and symptoms, the second partition is dedicated to therapy; Burton rejects ‘magic’ cures like philtres, amulets, or potions. There follows an interminable digression on the purification of the air, which, if healthy, cures melancholy, or at least alleviates it. Burton also cites as antidotes pleasures and amusements, the very things he denied himself every day, but which he longed for in all their variety. The difference between positive, spiritual love, and destructive, diabolical, bodily love is dealt with at the beginning of the third partition. Both, if used inappropriately or excessively, may cause melancholy. Step by step, Burton examines the phenomena of desire – spiritual love, love for abstract things, desire for beauty, love of country, for family, for noble ideals, for friends and so on, down to sexual love, both perverted and natural. Having

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lingered a while on the circumference, he now defines the centre: the circumstances that favour the explosion of lust, and the female arts of seduction that cause the explosion. He furnishes titillating details and descriptions of physical attributes. He is particularly attentive to strange, exotic attractions, like that of women for black men, or aristocratic males for kitchen maids and fruit sellers. He notes instances of love sparked off by the fleeting vision of naked flesh, or words whispered and overheard. Alongside obscure anecdotes, Burton mentions famous stories – those of Dido, Abelard, Shakespeare’s Benedick and Beatrice. Having listed the causes of love, he now turns his attention to the therapies of dissuasion for the man who is tempted, but does not repent; there follows a pageant of all the repulsive filth of the female.12 These passages are all in italics in the text, and all in Latin, as if to hide them from tender eyes.13 Dissuasion from passion also takes the form of the Jesuit method of compositio loci: the ‘patient’ is invited to imagine the woman without all her finery, and in the most unpleasant circumstances – while she defecates, or urinates, or bleeds in her menstrual period. In two cases, Burton reverts to his method of the sudden shortcut. Lust is incurable and generates melancholy; if this is so, the only remedy is for the lover to win and satisfy his desire. As regards jealousy, for which, again, coquettish and adulterous women are to blame (Burton gives a fine analysis of the symptoms of jealousy), the only remedy is to laugh and accept it. The third partition deals with religious melancholy, by which is meant any kind of acritical fanaticism, ‘enthusiasm’, superstition or anti-humanism. Burton, an Anglican priest with liberal tendencies, attacks the loud Calvinistic rants of the Puritans that destroy happiness by threatening eternal damnation. He is on the side of all-out tolerance. The cure for all kinds of melancholy is exercise and company – the very opposite to what Burton himself practised.

12 13

As I have said, a whole parenthetical section is dedicated to the regenerating qualities of love. On Latin as the ‘lingua franca’ par excellence (and language of love) cf. Brilli 1981, 22.

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§ 43. Thomas Browne* It is easy to be captivated by Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682), and, indeed, some recent critics have cast caution to the winds and declared him to be the greatest English prose stylist of all time in the non-narrative field.1 This is no doubt an exaggerated claim, justifiable only, maybe, up to 1850 or 1900, when the comparison would be with the likes of Lamb, Thackeray, Newman, Pater, or even, si parva licet, Alexander Smith. Despite the accolades, he has remained a minor author with a cult. Johnson did not care for him, and criticized him for the same post-Elizabethan farrago that irritated Pater. Browne’s reputation died with him; he was revived by Lamb and other Romantics. In America, he became an obsession for Melville and Emerson; in Italy, he was admired by D’Annunzio. Browne wrote the prose of a scientist, or pseudoscientist, but he looked upon himself and the world around him through the eyes of a poet.2 His works belong to that eternal genre, écriture artiste, rather than to the history of ideas. To praise a stylist qua stylist implies paying little or no attention to the contents. Can Browne be considered a great thinker? In Religio Medici he is certainly a *

Works, ed. G. L. Keynes, 6 vols, London 1928–1931; in 4 vols, London 1964; Thomas Browne, ed. J. Killeen, Oxford 2014. Selected Writings, ed. C. A. Patrides, Harmondsworth 1984, with excellent introduction and notes, and, in appendix, the biography by Johnson (1756). The essay, ‘Sir Thomas Browne’, by Walter Pater (see Volume 6, § 184.1) was published in Appreciations, London 1889, 127–66. M. Praz, ‘L’investigatore Thomas Browne’, in SSI, vol. I, 15–31 (the Italian version of an essay in English published in 1929); O. Leroy, Le Chevalier Thomas Browne, Paris 1931; E. S. Merton, Science and Imagination in Sir Thomas Browne, New York 1949; W. P. Dunn, Sir Thomas Browne, Minneapolis, MN 1950; P. Green, Sir Thomas Browne, London 1959; J. Bennett, Sir Thomas Browne, Cambridge 1962; F. L. Huntley, Sir Thomas Browne: A Biographical and Critical Study, Ann Arbor, MI 1962; L. Nathanson, The Strategy of Truth: A Study of Sir Thomas Browne, Chicago, IL 1967; Approaches to Sir Thomas Browne, ed. C. A. Patrides, Columbia, MO 1982; J. F. S. Post, Sir Thomas Browne, Boston, MA 1987; Sir Thomas Browne: The World Proposed, ed. R. Barbour and C. Preston, Oxford 2008; R. Barbour, Sir Thomas Browne: A Life, Oxford 2013.

1

For example, Saintsbury, in SAI, 449, at the beginning of one of his most detailed critiques. This is also Pater’s thesis.

2

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voice crying in the wilderness, preaching tolerance in the most intolerant of times, and ecumenical union instead of division. Religio is innocuous, silent, and meek when compared with the aggressive asperity of Milton’s thundering voice in the early 1640s. The idea of Browne as a heuristic thinker fades after the first few pages; the reader enters a reassuring, fantastic world in which the author tells us of his anxieties, his sweet fixations, his personal quarrels and Sternian hobbyhorses.3 When he abandons the memoirs genre, he seems to be someone from another planet, writing in a vacuum. Browne’s other four main works are similar excursions into the far-fetched, the bizarre, the abstruse; weird works of eccentric erudition. In his sortie into the occult and mysterious in The Garden of Cyrus, he is like Blake, though more controlled, or like Yeats, though less sinister. He is the first English writer to scan the life of the psyche and absent-mindedness. T. S. Eliot might have attributed to him a Metaphysical amalgam of thought and expression, almost the same thing as thought and sensibility. Browne’s thought, however, is never passionate, like Donne’s. 2. Browne was not the first English doctor with a writing habit, though he was a doctor who became a writer, rather than a writer turned doctor. He was born in London, the son of a cloth merchant. He studied at Oxford and at important medical schools on the Continent (Montpellier, Padua, Leiden). By 1636 he was back in England, in Norwich, where for fifty years he practised medicine with exemplary dedication. As an Anglican and royalist, he abstained from political involvement during Cromwell’s rule. Religio Medici, his first, miraculous, incomparable book, was followed by four more published at the leisurely pace of a patient craftsman. If Religio was written, as is believed, in 1635, then it was the work of a young man of thirty. Two pirate editions appeared in 1642 (one with a commentary by Kenelm Digby) after it had circulated in MS form. Browne decided to revise it the following year and published an authorized version. Before Browne died, it had been translated into French, German, Dutch and Latin. Browne’s aim is to reconcile religion with science, up until then considered antithetical 3

In reality, this champion of tolerance has some rather perverse idiosyncrasies: he is forever attacking the Koran and saying that the Jews are mad not to recognize the New Testament; what is more, they smell.

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by public opinion, which equated medicine with lack of belief. Browne rejects the accusation of apostasy or impiety, and examines the road which has led him, a doctor and scientist, to believe, and discusses the nature of this belief. There is a sharp contrast here with the contemporary climate in which every confession claimed to be the true religion, and denounced all the others as false (Browne’s tolerance includes Catholicism). I believe not enough has been said about the similarity between Religio and Traherne’s poetry and prose in Centuries of Meditations: the two authors did not know each other, and had different professions; Browne had the good fortune to see his works published while he was still alive, and enjoyed immediate fame; Traherne, on the contrary, was ‘discovered’ many years after his death, and is, in a way, recent for us.4 Both works are mosaics, made up of pieces that are independent or vaguely connected, about a page long, and numbered; but Browne is more rhapsodic, without any strict order (Pater twice uses the word ‘desultory’ to describe his style), and the two parts are asymmetric. The key point in both Browne and Traherne is that the spectacle of nature testifies to God as artist, architect, mathematician, and geometrician. Man views this hieroglyphic spectacle ‘asquint’, a reflection of God in things, and man’s mission is an investigation into the mystery of creation. Heaven is ineffable and indescribable, a dimension of total spiritual, not physical fulfilment; hell is fire, and above all, an inner, spiritual dimension. 3. Browne fell, temporarily, into several heresies: that the soul dies with the body, a belief held by Milton; those of Origen, an echo of which is found in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, on whether damnation is eternal; that of the prayer for the dead. He survived this heretical phase and emerged into the daylight of an unshakeable faith, pacific and tolerant, in the Anglican Church.5 At the end, reason ceases its search, and the believer exclaims oh altitudo, evoking Tertullian and his Certum est quia impossibile est. The first 4 5

§ 19.1. Browne was suspected of crypto-Catholicism by several contemporaries, but, nonetheless, Religio Medici was (incomprehensibly, according to Johnson) put on the Index by the Catholic Church, perhaps because of its possible deist slant, or because Browne, like Bacon, posited the existence of a ‘dual truth’ – rational and revealed.

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part is destruens in the sense that it faces and overcomes, at times with amazing ease, all the objections that the agnostic makes against faith. Some, for example, had envied the apostles for having been eye witnesses to Christ’s presence in Galilee. Browne objects that it is too easy to believe when one has seen; it is much more difficult to believe without seeing; indeed the triumph of faith is to believe what reason would deny. That ‘terrible word’, predestination, is a ‘trumpet call’ but not a prophecy of our future state. Fortune is an instrument of providence.6 He acknowledges there are slips and inconsistencies in the Bible, but on insignificant points, not on dogmas of faith, on which it is legitimate to have doubts and differences of opinion. The self-portrait achieves completion in the shorter second part which contains a self-confession while all theological issues are silenced. Narcissistic, notwithstanding all his declarations, Browne makes a show of listing his idiosyncrasies, so that his writing, passed off as objective, slides into the brash egotism, not to say mystical awareness, of one who is conscious of having been created in the image of God. 4. In Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646, and other editions enlarged in subsequent years), in a more phlegmatic, circumlocutory and Latinate style, Browne takes on the subject of ‘vulgar errors’, and to do so makes an encyclopaedic list of various superstitions and legends. He attempts to demonstrate that certain causes are not always followed by the effects expected by the common people. As an empiricist, he finds himself more and more denying that these effects actually take place. Browne here is Baconian up to a point, because he mixes scientific precision with a great deal of ingenuousness. Like Milton, he is almost the last of the followers of Ptolemy: he believes in astrology, alchemy, magic and miracles.7 Modern taste willingly applies a suspension of disbelief and follows with curiosity

6

7

In the essay in SSI cited in the bibliography, Praz affirms that Browne was the greatest authority on Dante of his time, and furnishes a long list of parallels in an attempt to prove, without really succeeding, that there is a profound affinity between the two. Like Dante, Browne believed that those philosophers who died before the revelation were excluded from Heaven. Two women suspected of witchcraft were tried and found guilty thanks to evidence given by Browne, who made no mystery of his belief in witches.

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the account of legendary wonders that Browne takes pleasure in reeling out rather than in debunking. There is bathos in the fact that, after telling off all the causes of human error,8 he concludes that the ‘secret promoter’ of these errors is the devil. Following the discovery in Norfolk of several Saxon burial sites (not Roman, as Browne believed), in 1658 he wrote a treatise on burial and cremation under the title of Hydriotaphia. A far from weighty tome, it consists of five short chapters, of which the fifth and last contains Browne’s most loved pages: a great symphony on the theme of death the leveller and destroyer of dreams of glory. This is the kind of subject that is found in Jacobean sermons, a Baroque depiction of the corruptibility of all earthly things. ‘Life is a pure flame’, Pater was to repeat, urging sensory experience, while Browne, instead, goes on: ‘and we live by an invisible Sun within us’. The Garden of Cyrus, published together with Hydriotaphia, traces the origin of plantations in the figure of the quincunx (like the black dots forming the number five on the dice) in the garden of Eden, and sees the same figure in other famous gardens of history. It soon turns into a semi-serious, staggering essay on medieval cosmology or oneiric fantasies, dedicated to the exposition and documentation of the ubiquity of what Browne calls ‘decussation’ (a neologism at the time). Were it not for the witty humour, one might think of mad Ruskin haunted by his ‘storm cloud’.9 The rhapsody ends with another highly imaginative section beginning: ‘But the Quincunx of Heaven runs low, and ’tis time to close the five ports of knowledge’, words much loved by English readers. Other works by Browne are a treatise on Christian morals (in Johnson’s edition it is preceded by a biography of the author); a letter to a recently bereaved friend; various short reflections by this curious writer, who might be defined a Linnaean cataloguer of the virtual10 – one who, for example, discusses the fish eaten by our Saviour with the disciples after the resurrection

8

Leopardi’s ‘Saggio sopra gli errori popolari degli antichi [‘An essay on the popular errors of the ancients’] seems to be modelled on the sixth chapter of the first part of this treatise. 9 Volume 6, § 48.3–4. 10 Pater compares him to Elias Ashmole, the collector and founder of the famous museum of the same name in Oxford.

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(listing all the different species of fish in the waters of Judea); or the author of the books of an imaginary library. § 44. Other prose writers In all the abundant production of prose works of the seventeenth century there is no sign of the novel: Lyly, Nashe and Deloney have left no direct heirs. Some of the reasons for this void are: the hostilities between the various Protestant sects, which leads to the predominance of political controversy, theological tracts, polemical literature, and homilies;1 the epidemic of classicism that imposes on the whole of Europe the figure of the erudite humanist, who uses Latin, the lingua franca, pushing English to one side; at least twenty years of real, not paper, war, between King and Parliament, which creates a ‘heroic’ version of history. In spite of, or owing to the Civil War, the English as a nation grow up, and are united; they need to survey the long history of their country from the origins to the present day. Ponderous works of history were written, along with others, more modest, showing the pleasure, sports, and hobbies of ordinary people. England in the seventeenth century was on the move, and wished to record its movements, look at itself in the mirror, show off; and, at the same time, it wished to know more about its past. The nation with such a long history was a tight mosaic of small regional and urban tiles, and one of the new emerging figures on the scene is the ‘local historian’, or ‘archivist’, or, to use the seventeenth-century term (which was almost a neologism), ‘antiquary’, a category that numbers many not-unimportant personages. All of a sudden, it was deemed necessary to have records of the lives of recent statesmen and illustrious thinkers, some of whom had given their lives to defend the freedom of conscience and thought, and others were shining examples of

1

Second only to Milton, Richard Baxter (1615–1691), amongst whose 170 works only Reliquiae and a few homilies are at all remembered, is a towering figure in the field of homilies and Puritan, or rather, Presbyterian apologetics. He was in favour of tolerance (but not for Catholics), and paid the price for this breadth of vision during the Protectorate. After the Restoration, too, his frankness and intransigence often landed him in trouble. He is admired for his noble rhetoric and fine style that place him just below Hooker in this category of writers.

§ 44. Other prose writers

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righteousness and genius. While Walton enlightened his fellow countrymen with his account of five exemplary lives, Aubrey took England off its pedestal of glory and showed its private, everyday side. This period also saw the rise of a very modern figure: the interviewer, or instant annotator of the boutades of the famous. Much like Drummond of Hawthornden and Ben Jonson, the celebrated jurist, John Selden, was immortalized by his note-taking secretary. From a sociological point of view, some of the works I shall mention below were commercial operations that benefited municipalities and publishers, while the rights of authors were as yet not protected, although Thomas Fuller is credited with being the first person to actually make a living through writing. Here I shall deal with only a few of the many prose writers of the time, most of whom are biographers, read for what they have to say about their more famous subjects. Some of them were extremely popular in their day, but were then forgotten, to be saved from oblivion by Lamb, to whom we owe a debt of gratitude. Today they await critical revaluation. 2. This said, we are getting remarkably close to fiction: there are ‘romances’, but in Latin, not realistic, but modelled on the most famous, indeed the only, romance in English, that of Sidney; prose creativity finds release in a fine translation of an eminent incunabulum of western fiction. This is the age of cranks like Burton and Browne, as we have seen. Thomas Urquhart (1611–1660), a Scot, published four unclassifiable treatises with incomprehensible Greek titles (a textbook of trigonometry, his family tree, a hotchpotch history of Scotland, a discourse on the universal language). These unreadable compendia, couched in a pedantic, artificial style, with frequent sprinklings of foreign words and phrases, are distant ancestors of Carroll’s nonsense and Joyce’s pastiches. As for translation, Urquhart provided the first English translation of the first two books of Rabelais’s novel, and managed to preserve the original creativity and joyful verve. John Owen (1563–1622) was the English Martial, with his Latin epigrams, which became popular in Germany and caught the attention of Lessing.2 John Barclay (1582–1621), a Scot with a French mother, was raised in Paris, and

2

John Owen (1616–1683) is also the name of a Puritan prose writer.

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died in Rome. He wrote the Latin Euphormionis Satyricon, a picaresque, satirical novel loosely based on Petronius’ Satyricon, in which he denigrated the Jesuits (who had tried to recruit him), and astrologers. The structure is provided by a political allegory with lots of imaginary characters representing real people. Barclay’s Argenis (1621), based on the Arcadia (the translation by Ben Jonson was lost in the fire that destroyed his house) is the name of a Sicilian maiden who marries one of five suitors. The fame of these two works resounds in the enthusiastic comments by eminent Latinists like Burton, Crashaw and Katherine Phillips.3 3. Anthony à Wood (1632–1695)4 was, like Burton, a lifelong resident at Oxford, and like him, but more so, a monk-like mover among manuscripts and bookshelves. Again like Burton, he was an ‘antiquary’ (the term limits Burton somewhat), and, ideally placed in the Bodleian, he wrote Athenae Oxonienses, the stories of illustrious members, compiled from written and oral sources. Unlike Burton, however, he was a cynical Heraclitus, not a laughing Democritus. Wood is quoted only because John Aubrey (1626–1697) furnished him with information for his vast compilation, and because his Brief Lives or Lives of Eminent Men were inserted in the form of additional notes (not completed, some of them of epigraphic brevity). Compared with Walton, Aubrey’s focus is not on pietas but the curious detail, the phobias and idiosyncrasies of his subjects; he loves a prurient anecdote, and a tasty bit of gossip. Thomas Fuller (1608–1661), priest and preacher, was a historian of the Anglican Church and the Crusades. Besides his historical works, he also wrote The Worthies of England, a collection of biographies, divided by counties, arranged in alphabetical order, and consisting of much first hand reporting. In a way, this is the first literary guidebook in English, and includes appendices and historical associations, among which an account of the contests of wit between Shakespeare and Jonson. Another intriguing work is The Holy State (1642), a miscellany of commonplaces, essays on various subjects, and ‘characters’, that is, types of people sharply defined and illustrated by a series of examples. Fuller was a favourite with some important Romantics, who were struck by the 3 4

CHI, vol. IV, 260. The ‘à’ of the surname was added as a whim by Wood himself.

§ 44. Other prose writers

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desecrating levity with which he treated both the sacred and profane. Various collections of his quips shot to fame on publication; today they appear obvious and uninspired.5 4. I have already had occasion to refer to the five biographies collected in the Lives6 of Izaak Walton (1593–1683), which he wrote without any direct acquaintance with the men in question, apart from Wotton and Donne. His sources were all second-hand, and his way of using them was to effect a ‘spontaneous’ deformation so that his subjects would comply with a model of integrity and abnegation; each biography is a masterpiece of occultation, and the presentation of each character suitably edited to fit the same ideal mould. Walton had no university education; in fact he was self-taught. He was a member of the London guild of merchants (perhaps dealing in cloth, or, more probably, metals). As well as his Lives, he is remembered for The Compleat Angler7 (1653). A comparison with The Anatomy of Melancholy is out of the question, and yet Walton’s book became a best-seller not long after Burton’s, and, while it cannot be defined a ‘book of life’, it was altered and added to through five editions before the author’s death, and set firmly on the road towards unprecedented popularity, just like Burton’s Anatomy.8 The Compleat Angler places Walton in the number of the fixated writers with ‘a bee in the bonnet’, ready to reduce everything to their own pet obsession. Right from the start, angling is used as a metaphor of the cosmos: the angler praises his favourite element and cites the history, wonders and historical associations of the sea; water is pronounced far superior to either air or land. Formally, The Compleat 5 6 7

8

As in M. Praz, ‘Biografie spicciole’, in SSI, vol. II, 104–7. Cf., for Herbert, § 12 in this volume, and for Donne, Wotton and Hooker the relative sections in Volume 1. The fifth is a biography of Bishop Robert Sanderson. The 1676 edition included an afterword by C. Cotton (1630–1687), a translator of Montaigne, author of burlesques, and above all, poems praised by Wordsworth for the freshness and grace with which they celebrate rural England and her natural beauty. As has often been wittily noticed, the link between Walton’s two main books is fishing: Donne, Wotton and Herbert were all anglers. It is just a little less encyclopaedic than the Anatomy, but he relies on the same sources as Burton (Seneca, Pliny, Elian, Du Bartas, Aldrovandus, etc.), and, like him, he quotes from them at random. The ‘melancholy’ fish is the pike.

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Angler partakes of the dramatic: it is divided into five ‘days’, rather than acts, and contains dialogue. There are no stage directions as such, but the dialogue gives details of what happens in the scene. The characters talk, and as they talk they walk – by river or pond, as they cast their line. The instructions imparted represent the future miracle of the English language in its ability to describe in great detail operations of which every part, and every necessary tool, has a name (fish are caught, but, above all, cooked). In the book, three healthy, witty gentlemen of means leave the town to take pleasure in their particular pastime in a countryside watered by clear, crystal rivers. After they have fished, they eat and drink, and sing old folk songs in spotless inns. The peace offered by the rivers and the lakes is enjoyed in the same seraphic way as in Traherne, and is borne to the reader by a neutral, unpolished language. The simplicity is charming, even naïve, but deceptive: the Angler is a deliberate and well-documented remake. This is a piscatorial pastoral, and it is hard not to think of the English Sannazarian variants of the genre. Walton’s book recalls Ascham’s Toxophilus and other lesserknown books of exercises and pastimes. Describing the dip into oblivion of three men of leisure in a kind of Eden was an indirect way to block out the clash of religious dispute and withdraw to an almost transcendent state of peace and quiet.9 ‘Angler’ and ‘Anglican’, after all, are linked in a paronomasia, and four of the apostles were fishermen. Walton’s merry trio can be traced back to Chaucer and Boccaccio, and forward to Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, Wells’s Mr Polly, Beckett’s Mercier and Camier and Last Orders by Graham Swift.

9

Cf. G. D’Elia, ‘Il pescatore perfetto e l’anglicano imperfetto di Izaak Walton’ [‘The Complete Angler and the Imperfect Anglican in Izaak Walton’], in Merope, IV, 1992, no. 7, 19–31.

Part II 

The Restoration

§ 45. Restoration literature As a natural reaction to the preceding age of, not only austerity, but aesthetic conformity and religious dictatorship, England after 1660 was characterized by a certain permissiveness, not to say licence, in manners, indirectly curbed by Milton and openly challenged by Bunyan. One, if not the principal ‘character’ of the next twenty-five years was the ‘rake’, which gave rise to a libertine literature best represented by Rochester and Sedley. This was not an entirely new literary phenomenon, but a spin-off from the just slightly less libertine verses of the Cavalier poets; some critics have claimed to see an underlying pseudo-philosophy of the pleasures of gambling and the lust for power, and a connection with the theories of Hobbes and Machiavelli (according to Rochester, rakes were anti-rationalism). As the offspring of nobility, the works of the libertines were read by their own restricted circle and the court. Poetry and the theatre, the latter before 1642 very close to the ordinary people – a popular, indeed, universal commodity – now restricted their range of appeal and established a closed circuit of readers or audience. The common reader today is turned away by the burning heat of personal, political and literary rivalries. After more than 100 years, satire appeared once more, and became the foremost literary genre, with writers exchanging blows like boxers in the ring. Opposition to rationalism and deism (the theologian Toland claimed there was nothing mysterious or ‘unreasonable’ in the Gospels) was put forward timidly by the Quakers, who placed great store on a God who is immanent in man, and practised, and preached, an early form of ‘enthusiasm’. The Royal Society, too, which obtained the royal patent in 1662, was founded by men of faith (the chemist, Boyle, and John Ray; but Bacon was there too) with no subversive agenda; in questions of religion, the agreement was to ‘overlook’ controversies concerning dogma. The Society adopted and proposed, however, an epistemological norm which gave precedence and preference to things over words (a utopia later satirized by Swift), and looked askance on sterile, hair-splitting argument. It also declared war on purely superficial wit. All these, however, were tendencies that reached the fullness of their potential only after the Glorious Revolution of 1688; in fact, after the death of Queen Anne in 1714. The Royal Society also had a hand in formulating and imposing linguistic norms and guidelines, with the aim of favouring

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the rise of a more realistic, concrete style of writing. The Restoration period thus became the time of clear, sharp, rather than vague, ideas; in matters of style, synthetic, mnemonic forms were preferred, and in poetry the heroic couplet began its long age of sway. Up to Dryden, the dominating criteria in literature were simplicity, truth to nature, and rejection of imaginative eccentricity. Hobbes, too, insisted on the control of reason in art, as well as on that of the imagination. These and other similar aesthetic rules were codified by Thomas Rymer (1643–1713), notorious for his disparagement of Shakespeare, and by Sir William Temple. 2. Restoration theatre will be introduced in § 46: of all the literary genres, drama once again becomes the dominant one, leaving rival categories in the shade and devoid of significant merit, with the possible exception of Dryden. One sign of the crisis gripping poetry is in the number of verse translations of classical authors – only slightly fewer than during the Renaissance – and translations of contemporary writers like Boileau and Scarron. The popularity of satirical poetry1 can be explained by the fact that Cromwell’s rule had seen the birth of ideological anarchy, with a bitter polarization of positions, and the formation of fiercely antagonistic groups and sects. As in all dictatorships, dissent was expressed in the form of clandestine mockery, which, once the dictatorship died, erupted into the open.2 In other words, the Civil War destroyed the monolithic model, and the belief in shared values: each person could think as he or she pleased. Hence the birth of multitudes of religious and political sects. Leaving to one side the novel (with the exception of Aphra Behn), the Restoration period saw the beginnings of the diary genre; memoirs, too, became fashionable, like those of Colonel Hutchinson, written by his widow, Lucy, or those of Margaret Cavendish. New genres included literary criticism, historiography, political theory, philosophy and scientific prose. Rationalism in architecture produced the quasi-Palladian buildings of Wren; in painting

1 2

Cf. CHI, vol. VIII, 90ff. Marvell, so light and graceful as a poet, becomes, as a satirist, bitter and clumsy (see § 25.6).

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it gave Lely and Kneller, and in music, Locke and Purcell, before the rise of Italian opera with Handel.3 § 46. The re-opening of the theatres In 1642, the Puritans closed the theatres, temporarily, for five years; in 1649, they closed them definitively. They did not, however, ban the publication of plays (it is significant that this period saw the Folio editions, after the first one of 1623, of Shakespeare and Jonson, and, in 1647, that of Beaumont and Fletcher). They allowed the performance of plays and farces derived from Shakespeare and taken round the country by travelling companies of actors. Private performances were also permitted, and masques were authorized in the houses of the nobility. So the theatre was kept alive clandestinely, as if in hibernation, and the Puritan authorities were quick to bow to necessity and reach a compromise: from 1656 Cromwell finally agreed to the resumption of theatrical performances, provided they were accompanied by music; in this way he contributed, albeit unwittingly, to the birth of English opera. Eighteen years of forced inactivity had had however disastrous effects on theatrical life in England, or, at the very least, it had done it no good, so that in 1660 the whole theatrical machine had to start practically from scratch. The London theatres had been stripped or reduced to rubble, and needed to be restored if not completely rebuilt. The repertoire, too, had to be renewed; of course, the old ‘Elizabethan’ plays were salvaged and included in the new offering. Tastes had changed, however; indeed, after only twenty years, they were unrecognizable. The parameters to employ in order to map the new late seventeenth-century, or Restoration, theatre are the same as in any new theatrical period: first of all, which theatres were to house the performance of old and new plays; secondly, the building innovations and structural variants; thirdly, what was the incidence of the decentralization of dramatic activity, how large were audiences, and how they were made up in sociological terms. Last, but not least, which and how many theatrical companies were active, and what was the modus operandi of directors and actors. Christopher Wren

3

I shall use throughout this English form of his name, rather than Händel.

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set to work to build the Dorset Garden and Drury theatres based on a new architectural project that was to change radically the very concept of communication in the theatre: the U-shaped stalls sector sloped, and contained ten rows of benches. From the walls came two levels of boxes, surmounted by a gallery. The scenery was no longer fixed: sliding panels at the back of the stage created a context of surroundings, and an illusion of reality. This illusion of reality had up to now been left to the imagination of the audience, as Sidney had complained, and as Shakespeare famously acknowledged through the mouthpiece of the Chorus in Henry V. The scenic designers, with experience acquired in their work on masques, were well-equipped to come up with amazing sets. The most fundamental innovation, however, was the actress: for the first time female roles were assigned to real women, and no longer, as in Shakespeare’s time, to boys or young men. Restoration theatre was quick to mould the scripts to this novelty, which had been forbidden to the Elizabethans. Among the actresses that became famous were Nell Gwynn, the mistress of Charles II, and Anne Bracegirdle; among the actors, Thomas Betterton. Dublin became the next most important theatrical centre after London, with the construction, in 1662, of a completely new theatre. Immediately after the return of the king in 1660, three companies were active in London. One fell by the wayside, leaving two, the ‘King’s company’ and the ‘Duke’s company’. In 1682, these two merged. In terms of audience, it was a theatre of the elite, so that the rate of productions decreased. Apart from Dryden, for personal reasons the principal playwrights of the period wrote a quarter, or less, compared with Dryden himself, and much less than the late Caroline authors like Heywood and Shirley.1 Terms of contract were now

1

In forty years, over 400 completely new plays were written and staged, but, such was the abundance of theatrical works produced between 1590 and 1642 that the theatre seasons of the new regime depended heavily on the re-staging of masterpieces of the pre-Cromwellian past. The impresario Thomas Killigrew (1612–1683), who, like Davenant, was also a playwright, secured the rights of Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher. Translations and adaptations were also rife: from Greek theatre, from Racine and Molière, and one or two Spanish writers. Seneca was definitively a thing of the past, and Shakespeare had to be revised to meet modern taste.

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radically different, and authors wrote for pleasure, not for sustenance. The growing licentiousness of the new theatre ended up by attracting the anathema of the self-righteous, and in 1698 not a Puritan like Prynne, but an Anglican vicar, Jeremy Collier (1650–1726), published his Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, one result of which was the suspension of the performances of Congreve’s The Way of the World. In the long term, another was the introduction of preventive censorship which, among other things, put an end to Fielding’s career as a dramatist in 1737. The comedy of manners of the Restoration was a sturdy plant which, after lying dormant for 200 years, was to flower once more with Oscar Wilde and Noël Coward. Its roots were in the late Elizabethans and Jacobeans, like Shirley. It was a theatre of evasion, but succeeded in absorbing the life-blood of political events after 1660. Two such events stand out: the Popish Plot, and the Exclusion crisis.2 Henceforth, any play written and performed will be unequivocally Whig or Tory. At the same time, the names of characters are usually transparently allegorical, as in Langland’s ‘dream’ 300 years earlier. The playwright names his character with a witticism or a wink, challenging the audience to discover its appropriateness. The fop, second only to the rake in frequency and importance in this theatre, is often given a name ending in the suffix ‘-wit’; alternatively, his personality will be conveyed in short syntagmas like ‘Touchwood’ or ‘Fainall’. Many of the names end in ‘-mant’, like Dorimant or Millamant. The resurgence of Jonson’s theory of humours, with similar semantic charge in the characters’ names? 2. Sir William Davenant (1606–1668) was already active before the theatres were closed. He was imprisoned by the Puritans and released through the intercession of Milton. Not only was he the first theatre manager and impresario after 1660; he was also the first author of the new theatre, and staged adaptations of Shakespeare, giving rise to rumours that he, Davenant, was the illegitimate son of the Swan of Avon. The Siege of Rhodes is the first English opera. Davenant was also the author of a mediocre poem, Gondibert, with a foreword by Cowley and Waller, in cantos of

2

§ 1.10.

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quatrains ill-suited to the narrative, on an Italian theme (more precisely, a Venetian-Lombard one), in which the hero wavers between the love for two maidens, against the inevitable background of warfare and bloodshed. Shakespearean adaptations were to reach their highest point with Dryden. The only other survivor of pre-1642 theatre was James Shirley. The term ‘Restoration theatre’ covers more than forty years, from 1660 to 1707, the year of Farquhar’s last play, uninterrupted even by the hostility to the theatre of William of Orange (his wife, on the other hand, was a lover of plays). The repertoire was renewed in 1660 mainly because the theatre had become an elite genre, its audience composed of courtiers, aristocrats, and members of the upper-middle class. As such, it welcomed foreign fashions, especially French (and, to a lesser degree, Spanish), given that Charles II had spent his years in exile in France, and, once he returned to England, had favoured the popularity of French fashions and customs. Saintsbury and others after him tended to minimize the debt owed by the new theatre to French romances, and have emphasized a metrical factor – the predominance of the heroic couplet, which brought with it the heroic subject matter.3 Heroic tragedy, which meant the pursuit of ideals that were no longer viable, and unattainable levels of love and honour, was acted out in pompous, bombastic language largely aimed at disguising exotic plots that were loosely constructed, lacklustre and lazily generic. Its life was short, a mere ten years; its decline began with the satirical parody written by Buckingham, The Rehearsal;4 the comedy of manners lasted longer, no doubt fortified by the cynicism, elegance and wit with which it held the mirror up to the lack of morals of the court. The ‘rake’s comedy’ is a kind of subspecies in a scale which goes from the comic to the tragic, and on to sheer horror. The most brazen of amoral rakes is Shadwell’s Don Juan. Congreve led this character close to self-reformation, creating the variant of the reformed rake.

3 4

SAI, 485. § 50.3.

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§ 47. Dryden I: The re-consecration of Stuart civilization

§ 47. Dryden* I: The re-consecration of Stuart civilization The works of John Dryden (1631–1700) may be divided into five main areas: prose (literary criticism); tragedies; comedies; poetry; 1

*

Works, various eds, 20 vols, Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles 1956–2002; Poetry, Prose and Plays, ed. D. Grant, London 1952. Separate editions: The Poems, ed. J. Kinsley, 4 vols, Oxford 1962; ed. P. Hammond and D. Hopkins, 4 vols, Harlow 1995–2005. Dramatic Works, ed. M. Summers, 6 vols, London 1931–1932, Gordian 1968 (textually inaccurate). Essays, ed. W. P. Ker, 2 vols, London 1900; ed. G. Watson, 2 vols, London 1962. Letters, ed. C. E. Ward, Durham, NC 1942. Life. A biography by Walter Scott opened the first volume of Works, ed. Scott himself, 18 vols, London 1808, 1921, rev. G. Saintsbury, London 1882–1893. K. Young, John Dryden: A Critical Biography, London 1954; C. E. Ward, The Life of John Dryden, Chapel Hill, NC 1961; J. M. Osborn, John Dryden: Some Biographical Facts and Problems, rev. edn, Gainesville, FL 1965; J. A. Winn, John Dryden and His World, New Haven, CT and London 1987; P. Hammond, John Dryden: A Literary Life, New York 1991. Criticism. G. Saintsbury, Dryden, London 1881; M. Van Doren, John Dryden: A Study of His Poetry, New York 1920, London 1946; T. S. Eliot, Homage to John Dryden, London 1924, and John Dryden: The Poet, the Dramatist, the Critic, New York 1932; L. I. Bredvold, The Intellectual Milieu of John Dryden, Ann Arbor, MI 1934, 1956; W. Frost, Dryden and the Art of Translation, New Haven, CT 1955; A. M. Crinò, John Dryden, Firenze 1957, and John Dryden poeta satirico, Firenze 1958; B. N. Schilling, Dryden and the Conservative Myth: A Reading of Absalom and Achitophel, New Haven, CT 1961, and, as editor, Dryden: A Collection of Critical Essays, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1963; A. W. Hoffman, John Dryden’s Imagery, Gainesville, FL 1962; A. C. Kirsch, Dryden’s Heroic Drama, Princeton, NJ 1965; A. Roper, Dryden’s Poetic Kingdoms, London 1965; Essential Articles for the Study of John Dryden, ed. H. T. Swedenberg, Hamden, CT 1966; E. Miner, Dryden’s Poetry, Bloomington, IN 1967, and, as editor, John Dryden, Athens, OH 1972; P. Harth, Contexts of Dryden’s Thought, Chicago, IL 1968, and Pen for a Party: Dryden’s Tory Propaganda in Its Contexts, Princeton, NJ 1993; Dryden’s Mind and Art, ed. B. King, Edinburgh 1969; S. Budick, Dryden and the Abyss of Light: A Study of  Religio Laici and The Hind and the Panther, New Haven, CT 1970; CRHE, ed. J. and H. Kinsley, New York 1971; S. N. Zwicker, Dryden’s Political Poetry: The Typology of King and Nation, Providence, RI 1972, and Politics and Language in Dryden’s Poetry: The Arts of Disguise, Princeton, NJ 1984; J. D. Garrison, Dryden and the Tradition of Panegyric, Berkeley, CA 1975; D. Wykes, A Preface to Dryden, London and New York 1977; G. McFadden, Dryden: The Public Writer, 1660–1685, Princeton, NJ 1978; J. M. Hall, John Dryden: A Reference Guide, Boston, MA 1984; J. Sloman, Dryden:

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translations1 (I have placed them, not in chronological order, but in a sequence that, in my personal opinion, reflects their relative merits and importance). Even a cursory survey of these works is sufficient for the reader to realize that this is literature made, essentially, of literature, with very little of real life experience. Dryden’s biography is short, and contains no sensational events or newsworthy gestures. The account of his life is full of assiduous reading and writing, attention to current cultural and political events, and, to a lesser extent, court duties. His existence is made up of habit, method, self-control; all attempts to scan his life using the lens of psychology, or psychoanalysis, all search for repressed passion, or carefully concealed peccadillos, would be destined to fail. Any piquancy would be the fruit of fantasy, speculation or manipulation.2 Dryden’s poetry, and The Poetics of Translation, Toronto 1985; D. Hopkins, John Dryden, Cambridge 1986, and John Dryden, Tavistock 2004; John Dryden, ed. H. Bloom, New York 1987; J. A. Winn, John Dryden and His World, New Haven, CT and London 1987; C. D. Reverand, Dryden’s Final Poetic Mode: The ‘Fables’, Philadelphia, PA 1988; D. Bywaters, Dryden in Revolutionary England, Berkeley, CA 1991; M. Sestito, Creare imitando. Dryden e il teatro, Udine 1999; John Dryden: Tercentenary Essays, ed. P. Hammond and D. Hopkins, Oxford 2000; The Cambridge Companion to John Dryden, ed. S. N. Zwicker, Cambridge 2004; S. Battisti, Metamorfosi del teatro: gli adattamenti shakespeariani di John Dryden, Bari 2005. 1 2

The scale given by Eliot 1932 is the following: poet, playwright, critic; but (cf. 45, 65) the order should be seen as ascending, not descending. He never went abroad, perhaps not even outside the borders of England. His family belonged to the Puritan, anti-royalist landed gentry. He was sent to Westminster School, then Cambridge, where he graduated. At twenty, he settled in London and was given a post as secretary under Cromwell. He later made a name for himself as a writer of encomiastic verse and playwright. He was quick to swear allegiance to Charles II, and was appointed Poet Laureate in 1668. The misogyny that marks his comedies was not, it seems, a consequence of his unhappy marriage to the much talked-of daughter of an earl, who bore him numerous children, but rather is due to imitation; just as classical tragedy provided themes like incest and homosexuality. His days were proverbially spent at Will’s Coffee-House, where a place was reserved for him by the fire in winter and on the veranda in the summer. From 1668, as I have already mentioned, Dryden’s life identifies with his writing. Winn 1987 is almost certain that Dryden was the lover of the second-rate actress, Anne Reeves.

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even more so, his plays, may be called ideological in content, and literary, rather than imaginative, in their origin, albeit at times in a framework of analogy or allegory. Every play is based on one or more sources, and ‘contaminates’ them; plots are almost always filtered through their auctores; some of the early poems, and, later, the satires, are ferociously ad personam, their victims usually rival authors. Others extol their dedicatees in life or in death. Dryden then moves directly to imitation, not counting political poems, and verses written in answer to some book or other, or interventions in religious controversies; bearing in mind, too, that two thirds of his non-dramatic poetical works are translations – from Greek and Latin, old English or Italian (Boccaccio). The ‘figure in the carpet’ in the multifarious phenomenology of Dryden’s work is that the author’s aim is, first, to define and affirm his own supremacy on the literary scene of the late seventeenth century, and then to celebrate the reborn Stuart regime as the zenith of English civilization from the origins until the present time. For Dryden, the two are inextricably linked. 2. In the six ‘Lines on Milton’, prefaced to one of the editions of Milton’s works, Dryden proclaims the author of Paradise Lost the third greatest poet in the world after Homer and Virgil, in an order which is not hierarchical but consecutive, and, amazingly, makes no mention of either Dante or Shakespeare. Milton is not inferior to the first two of the list in majesty of thought; indeed, he is their equal, because nature ‘joined the former two’ to produce him. This short epigraph should be read in the light of Dryden’s own situation: the synchronic and geographical criterion (the three poets ‘adorn’ Greece, Rome, and England) conflicts with the temporal, since with Milton ‘Nature could no farther go’. Dryden’s career seems to deny this, as his secret ambition, and even certainty was to be the ‘fourth amid so learned a band’.3 The image of grafting is valid in another sense, too: Dryden’s is a literature of implantation and combination; not for nothing is he considered the monarch of rifacimento. All the poetry he wrote before he turned to the theatre, and after he stopped writing for the stage, is grafted on to actual current events. The final stage of his career

3 Dante, Inferno, IV.102, in H. F. Cary’s translation.

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was translation, and translation is the highest form of grafting. Through no fault of his own, Dryden found himself living and working and aspiring only fifty years after Shakespeare and Jonson, and only ten after Milton. He felt the burden of their genius, but could not avoid competition. One of his masterpieces is a reworking or ‘improvement’ on Shakespeare. All his life he attempted to write a great epic poem, without success, but he did turn Paradise Lost into an operatic masque entitled The State of Innocence, a work of no great merit. One small, but coveted, posthumous prize he did receive was to be buried in Westminster Abbey, next to Chaucer. A fitting collocation, given that Dryden had called Chaucer, in the introduction to one of his translations, the first great writer in English. 3. At the same time, Dryden must have been aware early on in his life, of a perfectly wonderful, unique synchronization between himself and the society he was born into. He did not know Leibniz, but thought the England of the restored Stuarts the best of all possible worlds. From 1603 to 1660 a large fleet of smallish craft had found a flagship in Milton; from 1660 until the end of the century, Dryden succeeded in dominating an artistic void, and looked down on minor geniuses from a vantage point of undisputed supremacy. In short, he discovered he had the essential requisites for the position of leader and could aspire to what in fact came about: the forty years of his productive life came to be known as ‘the age of Dryden’. In 1660 he was thirty, the right age to set off on a long period of activity which was to last until he was seventy. Critics have emphasized his arrogance and presumption. It is not surprising to find that many of his poems are reflections on the English literary canon, and the first examples of systematized literary criticism in English, with the aim of collocating the present period in the historical context. The premise is that he, Dryden, is at the cutting edge of contemporary literature. So he spent his life revising tables of literary merit, which he laid out in various critical essays, inserting the occasional variable, but keeping well in the forefront the twin towering figures of Homer and Virgil. Development, design and aims were all clear to Dryden, and his critical essays contain hundreds of indications, some great, some small, that, taken together, constitute certainty. Scores of long, dusty critical volumes have attempted to reconstruct the ideological context Dryden lived in: we know he was a member, or rather, an onlooker

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at the meetings of the Royal Society; that he was a Hobbesian, and above all, a ‘Pyrrhonist’ sceptic, though deep down one feels that he remained, philosophically speaking, something of an amateur.4 Vico was more than half a century ahead of him, but Dryden’s works contain hints of a cyclical view of culture. He used to say that his own genius lay in ‘improving an invention rather than inventing something new’, but the improvement was spurred on by pride and betrayed no little ambition. Dryden’s way of thinking is based on an evolutionism that is already optimistic, teleological and positivistic: in its ability to explore doubts, as well as to confirm certainties, English literature had reached its peak in and after 1660, its moment of greatest, irreversible splendour, and was experiencing the birth of a new Augustan age. Dryden – though not born in London – lived there practically all his life, and became the London writer by definition; since London was caput mundi, as he thought, where else could he live? If he was the representative poet of the age, he was, therefore, the apex of its ‘admirable’ literature. However, he needed to argue this and, above all, demonstrate it, but how? By writing – poetry, comedies and tragedies – and by provoking, then silencing, his adversaries, using as a weapon the prose essay and the verse satire.5 Dryden the lawmaker does not confine himself to his natural sphere of action, but takes it upon himself to lay down the law in religious matters, too (the Restoration is not only political, but religious as well). As a theologian, he orders purges and enforces orthodoxy. In prose, he preaches the Counter-Reformation, in that he celebrates the triumph of the Catholic faith as expressed in its political and secular arm. In this, his aesthetics is not Baroque, like Crashaw’s, but by now decidedly neoclassical, with a clear sense of dimension and proportion, conveyed heuristically, through argument, rather than on the wings of rapturous imagination. I, too, believe, like many other scholars, that Dryden trimmed 4 5

There are those today, who with the help of a good deal of imagination, see traces in Dryden of linguistic reflections à la Wittgenstein, or issues like the psychic instability of the subject, the limits of reason, the origin of human laws, and the afterlife. Dryden was the mildest, the most innocuous of legislators, but was once set upon by ruffians in the pay of Rochester because he had vilified the mediocre playwright, Elkanah Settle (see below, n. 20).

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his sail during the Civil War, Protectorate and Restoration, and ended up by drifting towards the Stuart Catholicism of Charles and James. It was written in his genes; he discovered his true vocation and ideals gradually, not on some road to Damascus. He did not convert back to Protestantism after the Glorious Revolution, and paid the price. His last years were spent under the shadow of disgrace and even, perhaps, indigence. By converting to Catholicism, he had forfeited the position of Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal, and now refused to pander to William of Orange by dedicating to him his translation of Virgil.6 4. In textbooks, Dryden’s work is usually divided by genres and dealt with in separate places or sections. I shall, instead, adopt a holistic approach, beginning with the essays, which are central to his entire production, and a general introduction to the pragmatics of literary composition at the time. The prose preface, or verse epilogue in his plays was the vehicle for setting out his critical opinions at a time when the critical essay or volume was not as yet widespread, although Dryden did publish two long essays – more than fifty pages each – that have all the characteristics of the critical essay: the first is on ‘dramatic poesy’, the second, one of his last works, written in 1697, is an academic dissertation on Virgil and the Aeneid, which he had translated in its entirety. His critical work spans thirty-three years, from 1667, when he was thirty-five years old, to three years before his death in 1700, and concentrates at first on drama and dramatic theory; this is followed by essays on poetry, the epic poem, the heroic, and, finally, on translation in its practical and theoretical aspects. Only the first essay is ‘free-standing’, so to speak; it is not, that is, a direct offshoot of external events. All the others are ‘militant’, and many are punctilious rebuttals of objections raised against his plays. Dryden’s prose is hard and biting, relentlessly argumentative. If he decides to accept a challenge, he usually lays hold of his adversary, and, in a vice-like grip, crushes him. An implacable application of Aristotelian logic breaks the bones of the strongest challengers: he uses syllogisms with consummate skill, accuses his victim of begging the question, and assembles an unanswerable, detailed chain of 6

The circumstances of Dryden’s death are a temptation for hagiographers in view of the stoicism with which he resisted the amputation of his gout-ridden leg.

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proof. It has often been said that only G. B. Shaw is comparable to Dryden as a writer of prefaces, but one might include Matthew Arnold in the number. Dryden, like Arnold, held to ‘rules’, and thought that the English language should be confined and crystallized by means of an Academy. In Dryden, the subjects are slightly different, but there is the same determination not to let go, the same fighting and apologetic spirit, and, above all, the hairsplitting precision of something like God and the Bible – which is, after all, like several of Dryden’s essays, a book of footnotes.7 Dryden always seems to be very objective and cautious, almost self-critical on principle. He keeps repeating that one of his qualities is objectiveness, and therefore blames himself, retroactively, for breaking his own dramatic rules. That is, he establishes a series of rules and regulations, and then admits he is the first to break them, but with due justification. Eventually, we are forced to recognize that the critical structure that is being built is made up of precepts that sooner or later will be set at naught by Dryden himself.8 Self-defence against charges of arrogance is always in the offing. Mellifluous, flattering in his judgements, he is often guilty of condescension, self-indulgence, even narcissism. Without appearing to contradict himself, he is capable of praising Shakespeare to the highest heavens one minute, and cutting him down the next. The truth is Dryden is without fear, or scruples. With regard to his All for Love, he expresses his amazement that the ‘illiterate’ Shakespeare could have written such a great work as Antony and Cleopatra. Its author has been imitated by Dryden, and in order to do this with greater freedom, the imitator has done away with rhyme. Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida is more unpolished, and Dryden explains that what he has done in his new version is to rectify and refine the original. 5. The generally accepted frame of reference of all Dryden’s critical pronouncements is one of cyclical development, in which the present age represents the zenith of art and literature, the end point of a long but steady upward movement. Anyone looking for examples of the stentorian certainty 7 8

Volume 6, § 28. Taine, who saw in Dryden a struggle between his English love of tradition and admiration for the French, noted that ‘it is dangerous for an artist to be excellent in theory’ (TAI, vol. III, 12).

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with which this concept is repeated, would end up with a long list of cut and dried statements, as for example, in the Epilogue to The Conquest of Granada: ‘If Love and Honour now are higher raised / ’Tis not the poet, but the Age is praised. / Wit’s now arriv’d to a more high degree; / Our native Language more refined and free’. So the great poet is the natural consequence of the cultural achievement of an age. The historical implication is that after a peak there will be a dip: this is borne out by Greek civilization (with Aeschylus, the Greek language reached ‘complete perfection’), and by the Romans (Claudian lived in a barbaric age – that is, after the end of the Augustan cycle). The Restoration age in England was the point of arrival of an uninterrupted process of improvement and refinement that began with ‘father Chaucer’. Dryden was obsessed by the comparison between Ancients and Moderns, and this, from beginning to end, is the theme of ‘The Dramatic Poetry of the Last Age’, a systematic and symptomatic attack on the imperfect language and patent linguistic-dramatic incongruities even in Shakespeare, and, more understandably, in Fletcher, who, à la Arnold, would have been better writers if they had lived in a more refined age. Jonson, on the other hand, is for Dryden the ‘most judicious’ playwright. No playwright, apart from Jonson, had any experience of court life, which is the school of taste and language. To his detriment, Charles had travelled in Europe, and, on his return to England as king, had ‘Frenchified’ his court. Dryden’s idea of the superiority of the present age, and of the English over the French, was repeated as late as 1693, but Dryden was by then less convinced: he feared the advent, perhaps not imminent, of a barbarian, or ‘iron’ age, during which there would be no further ‘improvement of our language’. By that year, his canon of heroic poetry had been reduced to three names, Homer, Virgil, and Tasso; all the others had been shown the door. 6. ‘An Essay of Dramatic Poesy’, written during the plague of 1665, and published in 1668, is a miniature history of English drama in the form of a conversation, during an idyllic boat trip on the Thames (in the far distance, the roar of Dutch cannon), involving four characters with fictitious Greek names. This early work is the first expression of Dryden’s conviction, supported by argument, that human history always progresses, and that the Ancients have been reached and overtaken by the Moderns. It is therefore axiomatic that dramatic poetry will grow and bud and flourish until it reaches its highest point of development. The comparison is not just vertical,

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between Ancients and Moderns, but also horizontal, between the English and the French, and there are good reasons, according to Dryden, for awarding the medal for dramatic poetry to his fellow countrymen. Naturalness is the criterion that decides the priority and excellence of rhyme in dramatic verse, in that rhyme is far from common speech, as it should be, and, so, is preferable to blank verse. He is in favour of the Aristotelian unities, with minor exceptions, and later will add that acceptance of the unities and other prescriptions does not diminish the surveillance of reason, which voluntarily turns a blind eye, but still exercises control over the imagination, as Coleridge might have put it. Comedy, too, was to be purged of all suggestion of farce – farce is unnatural – without there being anything immoral or debatable in the fact that not all those deserving punishment actually receive it in the end, since the faults of comic heroes are less serious than those of the heroes of tragedy. On the other hand, according to Aristotle, the tragic hero must be neither too bad nor too innocent, so as to make it possible for the audience to feel pity and sympathy for him. As to the construction of plays, Dryden advised against the use of subplots and even against a comic storyline to act as a counterweight to the main tragic plot. Once again, Dryden is preaching what he did not always practise. Imitation is raised to the dimension of a re-creating art. The real artist does not steal but takes and uses pre-existing material, moulding it into something different and new. The defence of this kind of imitation is based on Longinus, and the frequency with which this authority is invoked goes some way to explaining why Hopkins, a self-confessed practitioner of the motto, ‘imitate to diversify’, should have been such an admirer of the neoclassical Laureate. Dryden claimed he had invented the heroic drama, though admitting that the way had been prepared by Davenant, and indicating a range of possible subjects in the opening lines of Orlando furioso. Of course, it was not Ariosto’s Furioso, but Virgil’s Aeneid that became the model for the heroic poem. For both the heroic poem and play, tropes of grandiloquence and hyperbole were acceptable tools.9 Dryden’s essay on

9

Dryden did in fact dream of writing a great national epic in verse, but discarded various subjects (Arthur, the Black Prince), and ended up by never finding a suitable theme, or, perhaps, the time and motivation.

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Ovid and the art of translation begins by positing three possible ways of rendering the original: word for word translation; paraphrase; imitation, that is, free re-writing of the original text. Dryden views this last alternative as an updating of the translated text, a new version the author might have written had he lived in a later age.10 This is practically the equivalent to postulating the need for exceptional critical skill and empathy on the part of the translator. 7. Dryden’s greatness as a prose writer has been unanimously acknowledged throughout the centuries, but has compromised his reputation as a poet. He was unhesitatingly declared ‘the father of English prose’, and the most authoritative and learned critic of English literature. He was also considered a trait d’union without which eighteenth-century poetry would have been impossible. Johnson’s famous remark on Dryden’s contribution to English poetry is significant, if debatable: ‘he found it brick, and left it marble’. Scott, his first editor, awarded him third place among English poets of all time. That Dryden should preserve his primacy as a poet for long was unthinkable. His reputation has fluctuated according to the tastes and the aesthetic mood of the day. Readers soon realized that something was lacking in this otherwise polished and competent poet, and that something was the warmth of personality. Too much self-control can be fatal. He fell on deaf ears throughout all of the nineteenth century, which passed on to Matthew Arnold a long-lasting verdict, that he was a classic of prose rather than poetry, which is rooted in the heart and soul, not in the intellect only. Taine, the author of an introduction which is still worth reading, dug deep and took apart the plays, finding them full of unreal effects, grossness, vulgarity and immorality. He attacked the heroic couplet as a metre that contrasted meaning. So that generally speaking, Dryden marked a move towards barbarity, rather than refinement in taste. Saintsbury acquitted him: he ‘was not a prosaic poet, but he was the poet of a prosaic time’.11 It was up to T. S. Eliot in 1921 and again in 1932 – Pound, disgusted, refused to read one word of Dryden ever again – to rehabilitate him for writing, 10 11

The task was neglected by Dryden, according to Taine (TAI, vol. III, 64), who called this updating a falsification of the original. SAI, 477.

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after the excesses of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans, a poetry that was clear and devoid of imagery, though also lacking in profundity. Eliot himself was a Dryden 300 years on. Dryden’s survival has often been achieved by means of easily digestible excerpts from his satires and short poems, which, taken whole, are not consonant with contemporary sensibility. Another ploy has been to pass him off as a writer of superb ‘beginnings’. In 1921 Eliot declared he was confident a revolution of taste would soon lead to a revaluation of ‘Dryden’s splendid verse’.12 However, at the present time Dryden remains something of a mummy, and a subject for academic debate. His primacy is a distant memory; his plays have only historical value, and are almost never performed. § 48. Dryden II: Early poetry. Elegiac, encomiastic, celebrative Dryden’s poetry stretches over two successive periods, and is of two kinds: first encomiastic, then, after fifteen years of theatrical activity, satirical and controversial. A third period sees Dryden engaged in large-scale verse translations (Virgil, Horace, Lucretius, Persius, Juvenal, and Theocritus). Dryden’s principal merit as a poet is metrical: he adopts and patents the heroic couplet. This form was then handed down to Pope and the Augustans, and dominated the eighteenth century, until it was shot down and left for dead by Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Lyrical Ballads. Whole libraries have been written on this choice of metre that brands English poetry from 1650, excluding Milton, and starting with Denham and Waller, the founding fathers. Dryden transformed the couplet into a prosodic-syntactic-conceptual unity, so that each single concept is concentrated, compressed and confined, like a clockwork mechanism, within the limits of two lines of verse. The chain of discourse becomes, in Dryden, an uninterrupted sequence of couplets (only once do we find quatrains), with an automatic and statistical increase in full stops, and a decrease in long propositions, and of hypotaxis in favour of parataxis. The heroic couplet naturally tends towards concision, but the unending succession of selfcontained microcircuits can result in monotony. Only a given number of

12

ESE, 315.

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syllables can be fitted into each couplet, so the poet finds himself having to eliminate as many superfluous words as possible. For example, Dryden never says ‘as if ’, but only ‘as’, thus saving a syllable. The tyranny of rhyme imposes various tropes: syntactic-grammatical reversals, principally, meaning the inversion of verb and object, so that often one is in some doubt as to which is the subject of the sentence and which the object.13 Another frequent elimination is that of the verb that rules two different objects, as in: ‘Thy tragic muse gives smiles, thy comic sleep’. All of this amounts to a meagre harvest as regards his pre-1667 verse, and if Dryden had written no more poetry, then this early work would be forgotten. 2. Dryden was inspired by Cowley, or, more likely, by Cleveland, in an early, academic elegy, similar to those by other Cambridge students (twelve years earlier, including Milton) for Edward King. These hundred lines of ‘metaphysical’ fireworks were in honour of young Lord Hastings, who died at twenty-one of smallpox. The endless display of often outlandish images aims to impress and shock; the following example is famous: ‘Each little pimple had a tear in it, /To wail the fault its rising did commit.’ An ode on the death of Cromwell in thirty-seven quatrains is the second of the two elegies with which Dryden made his debut on the literary scene; both are dedicated to someone outstanding in his field of action, and are themselves ‘outstanding’, but only in the sense of ‘exceeding the norm’, based as they are on high-flown language characterized by frequent resort to hyperbole. Both dedicatees held back thoughts of greatness that were ‘too precocious’. After Empson and the ‘new critics’ it was possible to look for and find hidden signs of subtle irony and dissent – conveyed, for example, by the choice of adverbs and even by metrical variations – and levelled at both Cromwell and Anglican theodicy. Dryden’s next important poem is a welcome extended to Charles II, Astraea Redux. One of the basic concepts is the return of a golden age, as frequently found in classical literature. Dryden ends the poem with the words: ‘Oh Happy Age! Oh times like those alone / By Fate reserv’d for Great Augustus Throne!’ Annus Mirabilis (1667) is the most accomplished work of this first phase; while the early works of a 13

Denounced as incorrect but inevitable in his essay, ‘Rhyme and Blank Verse’.

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poet are often too elliptical, overblown and exuberant, here the narration is linear and clear. This long ode contradicts my theory that Dryden wrote no excellent narrative poetry. It brings together two successive events that are apparently not connected in any way: the victorious war against the Low Countries, and the Great Fire of London. The informing principle is again the cyclical nature of history. Only recently the Dutch were masters of the sea, but now they are bowed and beaten, as Carthage was by Rome. An epic light is thrown on recent and contemporary events by means of a series of parallels with momentous historical or mythological happenings. According to Stuart historians, especially Fuller, the recent past had seen the spreading of a conviction that the Restoration had ushered in a new heroic age of unequalled glory. English society was gripped by a frenzy to which Dryden became mouthpiece. Quatrain 212 begins the second part with a ‘fade to’ the Fire of London. From now on the poem is punctuated by a number of purely narrative scenes, episodes that are described clearly, tersely and convincingly. In a crescendo of panic and confusion, the fire strikes at the heart of sleeping London, but the king is awake and among the first to come to the rescue. Innumerable scenes of fear, terror, desolation and pity (the one of the baby clutching its mother’s breast and finding a tear there, is famous; as is the king’s noble prayer). The angry God is placated, and with a pyramid of crystal creates a pump that extinguishes the fire! The extinguished fire in turn inspires the dream of a golden metropolis, which will rise from the ashes of the old city. It is no coincidence that Augusta is the ancient name of London. The fire has been a ritual of purification. § 49. Dryden III: The comedies Dryden’s works for the theatre number twenty-seven (or twenty-eight). He began with comedy, and for a while continued writing poetry at the same time. His comedies were staged at first by the re-constituted King’s Company, for which he agreed to write three plays a year, though he never managed to respect the agreement. Some of the plays were reviewed or ‘noticed’ in his inimitable, frank and idiosyncratic manner by the diarist, Samuel Pepys, with invaluable ‘live’ testimonies. The company had the foresight to cast the popular actress, Nell Gwynn, in many of the roles, as well as actor Thomas Betterton. Dryden continued to turn out plays

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at the same impressive rate as the various pre-1642 dramatists, at times outdoing them in number of works and approaching the overall totals, if not of Shirley or Heywood, at least of Massinger. Dryden’s comedies are apparently identical to the typical ‘romantic’ comedy in vogue thirty years earlier. He uses the well-tested structure of the double plot, one romantic, pathetic, or elegiac, and written in verse, the other a comic one, semi-serious, often vulgar and cynical, written in prose. The two distinct plots represent a class distinction, as the first, more noble, storyline involves aristocrats, while the comic plot is full of shepherds, peasants and servants. Dryden is especially good at creating a situation that risks exploding at any moment; and yet, in the end, the black cloud, full of poisonous and explosive gases, is transformed into a bubble of soap that bursts innocuously when pricked: the scare is over, normality returns. The ‘scare’ often concerns – as with the late Carolines, especially Shirley and Massinger – one or more adulteries that might be consummated on stage from one moment to the next; but Dryden is still more artificial: the characters seem to be on a cliff edge, able at any moment to step back from the precipice for reasons of self-interest or decorum. Without going to the root of the existence of desire, they prefer not to fight and resign themselves, with just a hint of bitterness, to married life. Taken all together, Dryden’s plays include some which are mediocre, or decidedly bad, and two or three others that are excellent, as lithe and graceful as swift antelopes, while much of Dryden’s later poetry plods along stolidly like a fully grown elephant. 2. Pepys found it difficult to identify the protagonist of the licentious prose play, The Wild Gallant (1663), taken from contemporary sources ( Jonson and Brome, a minor Jacobean playwright), and went back home somewhat perplexed. In The Rival Ladies (1664), in couplets alternating with prose, two girls disguised as pages contend for the favours of a fop. A much later comedy (1673) bore the eloquent subtitle of Love in a Nunnery. Walter Scott shrewdly observed that Dryden’s indelicacy is ‘like the forced impudence of a timid man’. Secret Love (1668), a tragicomedy, again in verse alternating with prose, titillates the audience by presenting a homosexual couple, with Nell Gwynn in the main role. The play was a huge success, and gained the plaudits of the king. These and other comedies, some of them re-workings of those by Molière, failed to become stable features of

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the repertoire, unlike Marriage à la Mode (1672–1673), a triumph of late seventeenth-century misogynistic wit, of which the prologue has become a proverbial statement on the evanescence of love and consequent absurdity of the presumed indissoluble union of wedlock – the same thesis, by the way, argued by Milton in his prose works, as already noted above. The main plot is vaguely reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale: the Sicilian setting, a usurper king, and two ingenuous, innocent foundlings, who are in love but cannot marry. Hermogenes tries to defend them and reveals partial truths concerning their past to the usurper; Leonidas takes courage and rebels against the tyrant. In the end, he marries Palmyra and becomes the rightful king of Sicily. The subplot weaves in and out of the main story, and revolves round two friends, one of whom is already betrothed, but pays court to the wife of his friend – a classic foursome. The stories overlap, in that the married friend of the subplot is a captain of the guard whom the king has ordered to look for the lost son or daughter, who will turn out to be Palmyra. Each of the two women in the subplot seems to enjoy to be courted, and there are numerous secret encounters that lead to nothing and are, therefore, extremely funny. In the end, ‘much ado about nothing’: all those that need to, pull themselves together, and adultery lowers its head and disappears. The virtuoso role belongs to the fiancée, Melantha, who is in the habit of seasoning her speeches with fashionable French words, and indeed has a vast store of new terms, so she never needs to use the same one twice. This comedy has aged well, thanks to several factors: the suspense created by Hermogenes, who reveals to the king, first, that he has found a boy, and then, a girl; the display of wit by the wife when she pretends to reject the suit of her husband’s friend while in reality encouraging it; the continuous alternation between the pathos of the young lovers and the verbal duelling of the foursome. As said before, the characters play with fire, but just as they are about to get burnt, everything goes back to what it was before. The message is that it is fun to play at virtual love-making, and pull back from the brink of consummation. After 1649, every stage usurper sparked a reaction in the audience, as did a restored king like Leonidas. The Spanish Friar (1681) marked a return to the theatre after a break of ten years. Dryden still mixes plots, the story of the pure, Platonic-romantic love of the queen of Aragon and General Torrismond, and the subplot

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of Lorenzo’s lust for the beautiful Elvira, wife of the Shylock-like Gomez, a surly old fellow who will end up by being cuckolded through the connivance of the friar of the title, a plump, pink-complexioned, paladin of (im)pure love. There are some fine comic moments, as when Gomez, the husband, discovers the lover disguised as a friar, and lifting his habit, is faced with his phallic sword. Dryden is already tragic here when he leads Torrismond to the discovery that his queen has commanded the death of his father, who lay imprisoned in a dungeon by orders of the usurper. The poor Jew, Gomez, is incapable of obtaining justice, and prostrates himself before the man he should denounce in public. The denouement two pages from the end is a bolt out of the blue, and Lorenzo discovers he is in love with his sister. The legitimate king lives, everyone is happy. 3. It is not fortuitous that Dryden’s best comedy is a rifacimento. So is his best tragedy. Naturally, Amphitryon (1690) has the advantage of a plot from Plautus through Molière, with a small number of characters that act out a straightforward story consisting of a few essential facts. The impression is one of rare perspicuity and great freshness, as if the author were still an enthusiastic young man, full of energy and inspiration, while in reality Dryden was already quite old, by the standards of the time. Some sharp, stinging darts are launched in the direction of the current regime in an ancient setting where everything is – as it had been for the Jacobeans – rutting, corruption and moral decadence. The opening of Amphitryon is magnificently blasphemous: the two gods, Mercury and Apollo, have descended to earth on a mission from Jupiter, but, ignorant of what the mission is, they are understandably bored and irritated. The premise is the usual one, that marriage, even between gods, is monotonous, and in the end, the man, and the god too, will look for other ‘game’. Enter Jupiter in the guise of a portentous, scheming libertine on the trail of Alcmena, who is waiting, all alone, for the valorous general Amphitryon to return to Thebes. Dryden splendidly domesticizes mythology; the three gods become mortals, and ordinary ones at that, as they exchange witticisms, and everyday life amalgamates with that of the gods. Jupiter goes in and out of his mythological role, and would reveal himself if only one knew he is disguised as Amphitryon. In the second act, Sosia duets at length

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with Mercury, and therefore, to his amazement, meets his double. Sosia and Bromia, with the flirty servant Phaedra (an invention of Dryden’s), constitute the accompaniment. Just when the reader is about to complain about the action being so fixed and unitary, Jupiter again plays the card of seduction. Misunderstandings are long and skilfully drawn out, and mix-ups are milked to the full. Listening to the real Sosia and the false Amphitryon is like travelling in time and sitting in on a scene from Mozart and Da Ponte’s version of the misdeeds of Don Giovanni and Leporello. There is real humour in the trial scene, in which an absurd judge (another invention of Dryden’s) is called on to decide which is the real Amphitryon; the two pretenders to the name differ only in temperament, one being calm, the other irascible. The double revelation of identity, of Mercury and Jupiter, ends the comedy, but announces the coming birth of Hercules, who – this is emphasized – will bring about a kind of Restoration: ‘the world wants a Hercules’, and Hercules will come bearing the gift of peace. A roundabout way of ending on a note of praise, and a confirmation of Dryden’s informing theme. §  50. Dryden IV: Genesis, development and limits of Dryden’s heroic tragedy If  Davenant was the precursor of heroic tragedy, Dryden was the practitioner par excellence and unchallenged master of the genre in a time frame that goes from 1665 up to 1678 (with some later additions). In a rather off-hand statement, largely ignored by English critics, Praz, after saying that the main sources of heroic tragedy are French and Spanish romances, and Ariosto’s poems, went on to claim that Dryden anticipates Metastasio, despite being weighed down by the trappings of Spanish Baroque and French classical formalism. If it is true that heroic tragedy was to be the equivalent of the heroic poem – as Dryden defined it – then the model and source of inspiration is clearly Tasso. Praz was so convinced of this diagnosis that he repeated it verbatim three times, if not more, in his writings on Dryden. In an analogical fever, he adds that, while there was at the time a reflux of taste towards Shakespeare, a number of themes, like incest, the femme fatale and the bloody tyrant were handed down to the pre-Romantics and Decadent Romantics, so that Dryden could well be

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included in the casebook of the ‘Romantic Agony’.14 So, what exactly is Dryden’s heroic tragedy? The basic ingredients are the exotic setting, the psychological chiaroscuro that differentiates the characters, spectacular sets, dazzling costumes, amazing special scenic effects thanks to the latest advances in stage machinery, and, above all, an emphatic, bombastic, swaggering style. The scenarios are stretched: no longer the present, or the recent historical past of England (Dryden avoids this like the plague). They are no longer European, or even ancient Greece or Rome, or the Mediterranean basin; the stories now are set in the Americas and the Indies. The suggestive choice of the Moorish world is repeated after the occasional use made by Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists. A complex weave of subtle political references appealed greatly to contemporary audiences, with, at the centre, the conflict between an implacable, unbending Realpolitik (represented by emperors, governors and generals), and the tyrannical rule of love (the irresistibly fascinating female mows down and paralyzes the sturdiest of heroes who would do anything for honour and military valour).15 When it comes to it, a similar dramatic formula is difficult to sustain, and gives no great results. The plots, hard to grasp, and stuffed full of characters with unlikely names, are brought to an end through resolutions that are usually wildly improbable. Furthermore, the heroic couplet is unsuitable for conveying passion; its discursive register is too regular, with no linguistic variants, or regional and personal differences in the manner of speaking. All this re-created world is avowedly false, and makes no pretence to realism or local colour – nor, to make up for it, is there the slightest hint of humour. After the fifth attempt at the genre, Dryden toned it down somewhat, and, in All for Love, abandoned it. 2. In The Indian Queen (1664) – written in collaboration with his brother-in-law, Howard – the Mexican emperor, Montezuma, wins the hand of Horatia; of the three rival suitors, two withdraw from the contest. The Indian Emperor (1665), a sequel of the previous play, is, instead, entirely by Dryden. In it, the Spaniards wish to conquer Mexico, while rebel Indians 14 All this is discussed, with abundant quotations, in ‘Il dramma inglese della Restaurazione e i suoi aspetti preromantici’, in SSI, vol. I, 153–69. 15 In 1680 the English possession of Tangiers was attacked by the Moors (ASH, 145).

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threaten Montezuma, who is intent on furthering his dynastic ambitions by assigning husbands to his daughters and wives to his sons. Montezuma proudly refuses to submit to the Spaniards, and negotiations fail, but Cortez falls in love with the emperor’s daughter. He captures the man who has been sent to kill him, and frees him. From the third act on, the story becomes confused: Almeria, the daughter of the Indian queen, captures Cortez and imprisons him. She falls in love with him, but Cortez is faithful to his first love. Dilemma follows dilemma, until Cortez, now free, resumes the battle, promising to save the father and brothers of his beloved. Here, perhaps for the first time, to close the tragedy Dryden uses a structural device which entails the self-elimination of all who hinder the re-establishing of the status quo: the two women who love Cortez kill themselves after betraying the demands of political necessity. Tyrannic Love (1670) centres on the persecution of St Catherine by the emperor Maximinus. In the torture scene several learned pagans are invited to lay snares for the martyr. Angels fly to her rescue – a Baroque stratagem – but cannot halt the tyrant. Catherine is martyred off-stage. The spectator, or more probably, reader, is reminded of Massinger’s first, vaguely Catholic, play on St Dorothea.16 Maximinus’ short speeches display what can only be called a parody of Satanism. The Conquest of Granada (1670), in two parts, totalling ten interminable acts, is penalized by its slow pace, and ends up by seeming static, weighed down by too many situations and characters. Here Dryden shows clearly the lack of those skills that enliven his comedies: heaviness replaces levity. Almanzor is the unwitting son of the enemy of the Arab army he serves heroically. A pillar of integrity, he breathes Marlovian honour and warmongering. At times, one might mistake him for Tamburlaine, with his stentorian voice and love of metaphor. He exudes energy and valour, until he is transfixed by Almahide, the Moorish queen. Almanzor asks the king, whom he has saved, for the bride he has promised, but instead is exiled. Almahide and Almanzor embody the proverbial conflict of honour, since one wants to die for the other, but both control their passion and are joined legitimately in the last act. The Arab king, too, is split: he knows that Almanzor might

16

Volume 1, § 141.3.

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well seduce his wife, but realizes that, from a military point of view, he cannot do without him. These inner doubts and fears make the second part superior to the first. In Aureng-Zebe (1675) the eponymous hero is in conflict with his aged father, who has fallen in love with the imprisoned Queen Indamora, betrothed to his own son. Other illicit or impossible loves pepper the plot, like that of the empress for Aureng-Zebe, her stepson; or the passion of Indamora for the governor of the town of Agra. This theme is the point on which all the main, interrelated characters converge. The fact that they are comparatively few makes the play more compact, besides being stylistically more direct. Aureng-Zebe’s stepbrother, too, falls in love with Indamora, and – a topos that Dryden evidently likes and uses frequently – offers to save Aureng-Zebe if she gives herself to him. AurengZebe is given famous lines of bitter recrimination. As always, in the end everything is sorted out, mainly thanks to self-elimination of characters or natural physical elimination. 3. The year 1670 saw the appearance of The Rehearsal, a ferocious, exhilarating parody, of joint authorship (Buckingham, Sprat, and others, including, perhaps, Samuel Butler). The play was written and ready nine years earlier but was kept in store, to be used against any exemplar of particularly excessive heroism. The main target was Dryden, his grandiloquent style and his often ridiculous scenic effects. It is reminiscent, in miniature, of several of the plays of the 1599 ‘war of the theatres’ between Marston, Chapman and Jonson. Possibly as a consequence of The Rehearsal, Dryden abandoned the heroic play, and turned once more to Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, appropriately altered to fit his dramatic principles. All for Love (1677), significantly in blank verse, is the most accomplished and successful of his three Shakespearean adaptations.17 Even Dryden’s detractors refrain from criticism, and remain speechless before this masterpiece. Taine himself was forced to insert a parenthesis in his work of demolition. To present Dryden’s play as an ‘improvement’ on Shakespeare is not 17

In his Troilus Dryden reduces the number of characters, but adds Andromache, and has Cressida, no faithless hussy, commit suicide. In general, there is less imagery than in the original. In his adaptation of The Tempest, written with Davenant, the cast was literally revolutionized.

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inaccurate, but is incomplete as a definition. It is an independent work, the title of which in no way recalls Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. It inaugurates an age of re-workings of great myths and great works of the past, from the seventeenth century onwards. Dryden had already ransacked Plautus, and was soon to visit, in collaboration with others, other Greek tragedies.18 This masterpiece, an authentic pièce de résistance of Restoration tragedy, is in fact a long poem characterized by sumptuous rhetoric, great lyricism, and lofty, uninterrupted declamation. More than Shakespeare, it is Marlowe reborn. Right from the first scenes, the tragedy identifies with the psychological drama of Antony, who hears his conscience in the voices of Ventidius and Dolabella. It is, therefore, a static, if not motionless, drama, in which concrete incitements to action are undermined by recollections and free oneiric imaginings. Ventidius tries to rouse a dispirited Antony, mindful of the other, energetic Antony he used to know. Antony seems convinced and encouraged, then leaves the centre stage to Cleopatra, only to reclaim it to rail against the cold Octavian and be again pushed back towards inertia by the gifts and passionate messages of Cleopatra. Dryden celebrates the flow of the kind of breathless, passionate love that, in its relentless excessiveness, becomes the stuff of melodrama. Both lovers abandon themselves above all to recrimination, and the only moment in Dryden which suggests and, indeed, authorizes a comparison with Shakespeare is Dolabella’s account of Cleopatra’s majestic journey down the Cydnus, an evocation, as in Shakespeare, of oriental sensuality at its most dazzling. In the third and fourth acts, with further powerful tremors of repressed sexuality, Antony is awoken from his torpor and energized at the prospect that Cleopatra might no longer be his, but will find some other lover. He makes one final attempt at resistance, and Cleopatra hastens to him, only to find him dying. She places an asp to her arm and receives its deadly poison.

18

§ 52.1.

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§ 51. Dryden V: Satirical and theological poems In 1666 Dryden was a writer of celebratory, euphoric verse, convinced that the restored Stuart monarchy was in the process of building a new Golden Age. He believed, too, that some momentous historical event was at hand, some peak of achievement reached, or the prophecy of even greater heights. When he turned once again to poetry, however, Dryden was a different man: he was disappointed, dismayed, above all, by the possibility of a weakening or even a breakdown of the public order that had only recently been re-established. In the early 1680s, the model of civilization in which he had blindly laid his trust was vacillating; it needed to be either re-stated or re-formulated. The country was about to split apart again, and plunge into the abyss of ruin and, even, war. Dryden’s job now was no longer to defend and extol, but to offend and mend, but without ceasing to adorn the present with solemn heroic lays to testify to the cosmic battle in course. Two poems of this period, Absalom and Achitophel and The Hind and the Panther, stand out from the rest of his poetic works for their size, so that in general, readers and critics have admired them, but at the same time deplored the boredom generated by them. This does not, however, prevent the yawning reader from pronouncing the first to be the greatest political satire in the English language, and the second a brilliant exercise in the medieval genre of theological allegory. Dryden himself did not care to create the best atmosphere for posterity. Satire, which is, by nature, militant, requires in the reader a knowledge of too many contemporary references, references that fade with time: issues that are of primary importance in a given present, will naturally become less so as they recede further into the past. It is also true that Dryden formulates his political and theological ideas in complicated, cumbersome analogical frames, to which he gives the key – itself a sign of unnecessary, summary premises and rather uninteresting stratagems. It is an admission of failure to argue that Dryden lives on, thanks to a few episodes of pure narrative or static description. When he narrates or describes, Dryden is clear, crisp, and effective, as in various parts of Annus Mirabilis. 2. The background of Absalom and Achitophel (1681) was the choice and appointment of the successor to Charles II: the king favoured his brother, James, and the Whigs, his illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth. Public

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opinion was divided: some, mindful of the Popish Plot organized by the renegade Titus Oates, feared that the king meant to hand over the country to Catholicism with the help of France. For Dryden, the most important thing was to guarantee the legitimate dynastic succession, although at the beginning of the poem he criticizes Charles for being ‘Davidic’ in the great number of his concubines. The use of the biblical story of David to refer to Charles, and the analogy between Achitophel and the Earl of Shaftsbury, was far from original; on the contrary, it had been used almost to excess, but never with such careful skill in construction, never with such phenomenal use of the poetic pantograph. There is a description of a game that cannot fail to remind one of Middleton’s The Game at Chess. Yet, if similar correspondences occur, and if they are not absurd, then it means that for Joyce as for Dryden, who epicizes noting the precise historical recurrence, history does repeat itself. Dryden does not pursue an alienating objective: on the contrary, he disautomatizes by means of parentheses, disparaging between-the-lines comments, and sudden humorous boutades. In the second part (1682), Achitophel-Shaftesbury re-appears on the scene, and tries to persuade Absalom-Monmouth to lead the rebellion. This was written by his collaborator, Nahum Tate,19 though two particularly striking portraits, those of Og (Shadwell) and Doeg (Settle),20 are undoubtedly by 19

Nahum Tate (1652–1715), an Irishman. His fame as a second-rate poet is not dissimilar to that of Flecknoe himself. Nonetheless, he wrote the sober, restrained libretto for Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, translated a new version of the Psalms, and composed a number of popular Protestant hymns that earned him the nomination as Poet Laureate. He was also the author of the most successful (at the time) and most deplored (later) Shakespearean adaptations, apart from Dryden: in 1681 he eliminated the Fool from King Lear and introduced a love story between Edgar and Cordelia. He also ended the play with Lear, Gloucester and Cordelia all still alive. This mutilated version was the one staged until the end of the nineteenth century, when the great Victorian actor, Macready, reinstated the original. Tate was a friend of the miniaturist and uneven poet, Thomas Flatman (1635–1688), whose funereal, autumnal vein anticipates Young. Flatman was inserted by Rochester in his list of enemies. 20 Elkanah Settle (1648–1724), best known for his much admired The Empress of Morocco, but for many an example of the degeneration of taste at the court of Charles

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Dryden. The poem takes the form of a gallery of portraits, painted from stationary, not moving, models, much like the ones Chaucer created in the Prologue to his Canterbury Tales. In this same year of 1682, the Whigs had a medal struck to celebrate the acquittal of Shaftesbury, and Dryden responded with The Medal to an attack by Shadwell. Dryden’s jeremiad is full of obscure, impenetrable prophecies dominated by the image of a loathsome pestilence.21 3. Mac Flecknoe, an attack on the above-mentioned Shadwell, published in 1682 (but probably written earlier), is, in my opinion, the most enjoyable, effective, biting satire penned by Dryden, weighed down though it is by too many topical allusions that require notes to be appreciated (some references are still not understood today). This is the problem with all satires, whose darts pierce the living flesh of its victims, but become blunted by the passing of time. In the 1680s Dryden carried out a drastic purge of the contemporary literary canon: in a solemn ceremony and public denunciation, he weeded out the unworthy, the presumptuous, the infiltrators, and established an academy for the chosen few, nominated by Dryden himself. Mac Flecknoe is this very ceremony, this rite, this act of expulsion. Shadwell, as we shall see later, was a mediocre author who boasted of being the true heir of Jonson. In spite of this, he and Dryden got on well enough together, until something happened, we don’t know what, that infuriated Dryden, and out he came with this entertaining parody.22 Dryden begins with a statement – or epigram, or aphorism – that reverses his idea of the cyclical return and continuous evolution of history: ‘All humane things are subject to decay’, and when fate summons, all monarchs, both literal II. He specialized in ‘lurid’ scenes – oneiric seduction, ghosts that return to make love to the living (some such scene is also found in Ford), cruelty and torture. 21 Shaftesbury features among the characters of Dryden’s ‘masque’, Albion and Albanius (1680) – though in his Preface Dryden does not use the term – with devil’s wings and snakes coiled round his body, and lots of ‘fanatical rebel heads’ that suck the poison that flows like a spring from his side. This was a clear allegory of recent events, with the chromatic opposition between albus (white), and the black of the Puritans and those who created mischief by supporting separatism. 22 Unless the last straw was Shadwell’s appreciation of The Rehearsal, which, as said above (§ 50.3), satirized Dryden.

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and literary, must obey. It is also true that, in order to strike at his real target, Dryden chooses an intermediary, and thus kills two poets with one parody. The tirade against Shadwell is placed in the mouth of another poetaster, Flecknoe, an Irishman, who was visited in Rome by Marvell and mocked by him in a satire.23 Flecknoe was a man in whom presumption was second only to poetic incompetence. Self-assured and never before so fluent, Dryden attributes to the dying Flecknoe, prince and monarch – not of wit, but of nonsense – the choice of his successor: in an imaginary speech Dryden has him pick the poet that resembles him most – Shadwell. There is a lot of stupidity around but, brilliantly, ‘Shadwell never deviates into sense’. The biblical parody is at hand, and Flecknoe uses it, calling himself John the Baptist, whose mission is to announce the coming of one greater than he. Here the style of the poet behind the scenes takes on, parodistically, biblical tones and rhythms, with an abundance of archaic words and phrases. Flecknoe is the herald of the investiture and ennoblement of Shadwell. A little more than a third of the way through the poem, the satire has turned into a refined play of quotations and references, more or less overt, to Shadwell’s own plays, and others that similarly have sunk so far into obscurity as to be practically meaningless to the modern reader. Shadwell’s apotheosis is veined by imperceptible bathos, and subverted by subtle mockery. So, to avoid misunderstandings, Dryden divests Mac Flecknoe of overly obscure or esoteric allusions, which might be misconstrued – taken ‘seriously’, that is, not ironically – and speaks literally. Out of the three parts, the second, diatonically, is in the first person, with the poet’s voice giving a description of a school for actors covered in ridicule and filth, buried under scatological allusions and references to obscene practices. For the second time, Dryden mentions Augustus ironically, reminding readers that the ancient name of London was Augusta, a name sullied by Shadwell. This cradle of Shadwellian art, the acting school, borders on places of pollution and vice, images from a degraded dramatic tradition that must be marginalized. It is not the tradition of the Fletchers, but only of second-rate players and clowns, suitable companions for such

23

§ 51.3.

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low creatures as Shadwell. The third moment is the oneiric coronation of Shadwell in the streets of London, littered with pages torn from the publications of his peers: ‘Martyrs of pies, and reliques of the bum’.24 Mac Flecknoe hands over to his successor the symbols of his office, amongst which a tankard of beer (Shadwell was something of a drinker). The address closes with Mac Flecknoe’s augural greetings to his successor, whose mission is to instruct posterity in ignorance. Dryden promotes some militant playwrights, like Etherege, but expels others. The biblical symbolism returns in the last lines in the form of a peremptory seal, because, like Elijah, Mac Flecknoe sinks into a hole and leaves his mantle to his rightful heir. 4. Religio Laici (1682), the title of which clearly echoes Browne’s Religio Medici, deals with the relationship between Anglicans and Presbyterians. Another example of the militant Dryden, this verse pamphlet was occasioned by the publication of the English translation of the French theologian Richard Simon’s Critical History of the Old Testament, in which the author, seeing that the Bible could not be considered infallible, maintained the advisability of submitting to the ecclesiastical authority in matters of interpretation. This, of course, was unacceptable for a Protestant. Confutation of the opponent does not proceed through an amalgam of sensibility and intellect, as in Donne. As a legislator, Dryden seeks to establish parameters in religion, as in literature, and to declare certain propositions erroneous. His position is one of orthodox Anglicanism, according to which faith helps and succours reason; in short, revelation of the divine plan of creation. Dryden uses the heroic couplet to discuss subjects which are more suited to the medium of prose. He forces the poetic medium, risking failure, and attempts to prove that the couplet is the most pliant of all poetic metres. However, Dryden poses the problem of a Church that represents an authority for him too. For the moment, he rejects the hypothesis, but he reflects on it. The position he arrives at is one of centrality: the Bible is 24 That is, paper to wrap or cook pies, or toilet paper. Dryden plays on the fact that ‘shit and ‘Shadwell’ begin with the same consonantal sound. The parallel is activated whenever he mentions the name of his rival, which, conventionally, is contracted to ‘Sh–’. The scatological isotopy is closed at the end, with other subtle inferences based on phonological dissemination.

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the only source for the working out of one’s faith, but freedom of interpretation has led to a plethora of sects. So all extremism is to be avoided. The note is one of resistance against change and an invitation to quietism. The Hind and the Panther (1687) centres on the equation between the Catholic Church as a hind, and the Anglican as a Panther. Seven other characters on the scene are portrayed as various animals of the forest. Abstract theology and doctrine are mixed with fable and allegory, unlike in Religio Laici. Dryden continued his theological journey with the daring and ambitious choice of a medium that was not easily bent to fit the contents. The fine description of the hind, together with those of the other allegorical animals, soon gives way to a dissertation on the limits of reason, the necessity of faith and the importance of ecclesiastical tradition. Once again, Dryden does not indulge in illusion, and soon lifts the allegorical veil. He suspends the vehicle, to dedicate himself to the tenor in a tightly controlled game. This exuberant, intoxicated poem, though couched in brilliant formalized terms, is clearly a precursor of Browning’s interminable religious monologues, which often contain apparently simple frames and metaphorical vehicles. There is no lack of cutting satirical or descriptive verse, but it is stifled by theological discourse and a bewildering multiplicity of examples, definitions, and split hairs. In the final analysis, Dryden expresses complete confidence in the Pope and the councils, and rejects the possibility of free interpretation by the individual. The Church acts as censor and custodian of the correct interpretation, and corresponds to that uniforming agency that Dryden had always sought. There is, of course, total correspondence with the political vision of a constitutional monarchy. 5. With the ode on the death of Anne Killigrew, and another on the minor poet John Oldham, Dryden returns to the elegiac genre. Though these elegies display some slight hints of emotion, and the poet’s public voice seems to falter and break with grief, they are still products of the poetic legislator: in the poem for Oldham it is difficult not to hear a note of arrogance when the deceased poet is graciously admitted to the select Olympus, Dryden having discovered belatedly that he is ‘in the same poetic mould with mine’. He opens the gates to Oldham and promotes him there and then. Yet Oldham was lacking something too! Two assumptions are celebrated in ‘Anne Killigrew’: the heavenly one of the deceased into the

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family of singers of hymns and her admittance to the earthly sisterhood of famous painters and poets. The poem also presents clearly defined images inspired by Killigrew’s exceptional, miraculous birth. The fourth of its Pindaric stanzas even contains the expected negative hyperbole: the whole company of elected poets has been devalued in proportion to the immaculate purity of the female poet. Dryden includes himself in the number of these devalued poets. There is a return here of the rhyme ‘born / adorn’25 which for Dryden always indicates artistic excellence. In the seventh stanza the angels, hearing Anne’s divine music, mistake earth for heaven. Dryden’s ode to St Cecilia, set to music by Purcell, celebrates the power of music, which accompanied the Creation, awaking nature from death, and finally making man the supreme example of the harmony that subdues and dominates chaos. Music contains the numinous, as confirmed by the case of Jubal; each of the various instruments arouses a different emotion (Dryden subscribes to the semantic theory of music, which also assigns meanings to each instrument and tone colour). ‘Alexander’s Feast’26 is, instead, a narrative cantata, and a series of mythological scenes conjured up for the emperor by the sound of music, as if suggesting to the composer instrumentation and orchestration. Dionysian images are followed by that of Darius lying bleeding and defeated. Throughout, music, played by Timotheus, excites or calms the king. § 52. Lee Like Dryden, a student of Cambridge, the son of an eminent ecclesiastic (first Presbyterian, then monarchist), Nathaniel Lee (ca. 1653–1692) at an early age gave signs of mental instability, and died à la Marlowe, in a tavern brawl. A second version of his death has him escaping from Bedlam, and dying of cold. According to a third legend, he was run over by a coach and killed. A would-be actor – he had the physique du rôle and the voice as well – he was handicapped by stage fright. A bohemian alcoholic, he wrote, while still very young, seven tragedies, and only one 25 26

In his lines on Milton (§ 47.2) great poets are ‘born to adorn’. First set to music by the almost unknown Giovanni Battista Draghi, and much later by Handel.

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comedy. His first play, written when he was just over twenty, was Nero (1674), followed by Sophonisba (1675) and Gloriana (1676). The subject of his first play speaks volumes, but so does Gloriana, which does not refer to the Elizabethan epithet used for the queen, but draws a scandalous and desecrating picture of the Roman world, while at the same time suggesting an audacious parallel between the corrupt, spineless court of Augustus and that of Charles II. Lee’s plays are full of references, some veiled, others explicit, to contemporary politics. Dissolute, delirious kings on the verge of collapse became his speciality; his pessimism prevented him from lighting upon any alternative to despotic power and the determinism of emotions. After Hannibal, Massinissa and Alexander, it was the turn of Constantine to attract his attention. In this, his last work (Constantine the Great, 1683), the Roman emperor steps back at the last minute from the abyss of madness, and escapes from the conspiracies of the wicked counsellor, Arius. The Rival Queens (1677) was a great success at the time, and was still being performed well into the nineteenth century. The ‘rival queens’,1 who engage in high tension verbal exchanges marked by paroxysms of hyperbole, are the concubine, Roxana, and the queen consort, Statira. The former, a raging, bloodthirsty version of abandoned Dido, stabs to death the legitimate queen of Alexander, whose empire is tottering, undermined by favouritism, corruption and immorality, so that in the end he is poisoned by the conspirators. Semandra, in Mithridates (acted 1678), arouses the lust of the king of Pontus. Starting from the titles, an almost Marlovian tragic heroism is discernible, as well as reminiscences of the bloodier of the Elizabethan tragedies (there are traces of Marlowe in some of Dryden’s tragedies, too). Ipso facto Lee shows that he is willing and able to go back and exhume the old Senecan theatre.2 After using the heroic couplet he, like Dryden, wisely

1 2

An Alexander the Great philanderer but capable of keeping control of his erotic urges had already been presented by Lyly in his comedy, Campapse. The rejection of the aesthetics of Dryden’s heroic play is evinced by a growing fatalistic determinism, which leaves tyrants to their own devices, and condemns the righteous to passiveness. The abolition of poetic justice and of the optimistic epilogue also contributed to the demise of the form. Lee’s plays often end, like Webster’s, in a bloodbath.

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reverted to the master metre of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans, blank verse. He collaborated with Dryden in Oedipus (1769), which some have found to be cold and artificial, while others call it a masterpiece,3 and in The Duke of Guise. Among the subjects of other plays of bloodshed are the massacre of St Bartholomew (like Marlowe),4 Cesare Borgia and Theodosius. The play by Madame de Lafayette, Princesse de Clèves, was revolutionized (The Princesse of Cleve, perhaps 1681), Nemours becoming a fashionable rake and possible stand-in for Rochester.5 The potential for drama and poetry offered by the Popish Plot and the exclusion of Monmouth from the throne can be seen in Lee’s Brutus (1680). The noble Roman – in one of the best examples of the heroic dilemma – sacrifices his children on the altar of the republican cause. With The Duke of Guise (1682) Lee returned to the Tory play, casting some doubts on Dryden’s ‘unbending’ consistence. 2. Unlike other playwrights who are better read than performed, Lee has always been at his most effective on the stage, as is proved by his longlasting place in theatrical repertoires (longer than Dryden). This has led to two differing assessments of his art: one positive, a revaluation; the other negative, branding him as an artificial, technically incompetent playwright. In fact, the commercial success of his plays, and those of Thomas Southerne,6 are, according to this school of thought, proof of the abysmal level of English tragedy at the time. The charges levelled are the usual ones: lack of dramatic continuity, the chiaroscuro quality of the text, with brilliant sequences, interventions and dialogues mixed in a jumble with others of very poor quality; the far-fetched plots punctuated by sudden, 3 4 5 6

For similar opposing interpretations, cf. C. Visser, in MAR, vol. II, 242, and the introduction to the Italian translation of the play, ed. M. Sestito, Venezia 2008. For obvious political reasons, The Massacre at Paris was blocked by censorship for ten years, and was not performed until 1689. SEL, 143–4. Thomas Southerne (1660–1746), Irish by birth, studied at the Inner Temple. He was a prolific author of comedies of the age of Queen Anne. Worthy of note are The Fatal Marriage and, above all, Oroonoko (1696), a romantic dramatization of Aphra Behn’s novel of the same name (§ 71.2). Southerne’s play differs from the original in the greater emphasis placed on the governor’s love for Imoinda, the daughter of a white European. Oroonoko commits suicide.

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meaningless twists; above all, the pervasive ‘hothouse’ atmosphere, and a dramatic language that is kept at the very highest pitch of exaltation and hysteria. Despite all this, many quotations from Lee’s works have become familiar – single lines, as if engraved in marble – thanks also to the metrical reinforcement provided by blank verse, as opposed to the heroic couplet, which is unsuited to the expression of wild, uncontrolled emotion. At a guess, anyone who reads Lee speculates and finds that he might become a cult author – like that of The Revenger’s Tragedy – destined to delight the likes of Swinburne, and, as a consequence, of Mario Praz too. After all, these plays written by a madman traversed by genius, exude sadism and masochism. Exaggerated, perverted, bloodthirsty, obsessed with incest, they are the natural forebears of the ‘Romantic Agony’.7 § 53. Otway Like other, less gifted, writers amongst whom Lee, Thomas Otway (1652–1685) throws on the table of late seventeenth-century drama a card which had never or only rarely been played. This is the adaptation of Shakespeare or other Jacobean authors, in blank verse – in itself no novelty – but quite unlike Dryden’s bombastic heroic genre, while remaining a tragedy of dilemmas. This kind of play is best described by the adjective ‘intimistic’. This revival was achieved by placing at the centre of the tragedy, not the subject of uncontrollable lust or adultery, and unscrupulous suitors who rape virgins before the wedding ceremony, but the happily married couple, with the devoted husband a slave to his wife, a paradigm of integrity and fidelity, and the chaste wife who would never even dream of betraying her husband. Naturally, a villain is at hand to put this exemplary display of chastity to the test; or else a former lover, while respecting her innocence,

7

For the parallel Lee-Otway-Swinburne cf. SSI, vol. I, 165. Not surprisingly, the essay containing these observations (for bibliographical details, cf. above, § 50.1 n. 14) is indicated as an ‘integration’ to Praz’s The Romantic Agony. Praz appears to follow very closely R. Ham, Otway and Lee, New Haven, CT 1931. With regard to Lee as yet another late Elizabethan dramatist, obsessed with the figure of the Machiavellian villain – and with the ‘gloomy Italian palace’ made fashionable by another Lee, Vernon – cf. PMI, 149, 377.

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tries desperately to satisfy a romantic, chivalric passion (not excluding the possibility of some sexual satisfaction), but in the end remains a Platonic adorer of the loved one, and chooses exile or death as the only solution of the dilemma. In another case, the model husband falls into a trap he himself has laid: he allows himself to be talked into a conspiracy to overthrow the government, but withdraws for love of his wife. The end of the play coincides almost always with a dramatic stalemate, whereby the couple must accept the consequences of the dilemma, and either die or go mad. A key scene in Otway, one that becomes his trademark, is when the two lovers reminisce and mourn past happiness, and in the very slow build-up to inevitable death exchange heart-wrenching avowals of eternal love in the life to come. In all of this, Otway seems to lean back towards Shakespeare (his chaste brides are all copies of Desdemona, Imogen, Hermione, even Juliet) by way of Ford, and grafting Ford onto Shakespeare. Before Otway, only Ford had written of married love in such delicate, tender tones; only Ford had dipped into the same repertoire of chaste, diaphanous images – like those of the sacrificial lamb or dove – to express the painful, draining languor of love.1 The stoic heroism of a Brutus, Catiline or Caesar is inversely evoked by Otway’s male protagonists, who bluster and boast but soon collapse, while the women are strong, and make the men bend the knee to them in obeisance. This picture might have been lifted straight from Otway’s life: life and art as communicating chambers. Otway was not, and could not be, a powerful tragedian, and in fact critics find no power in him, but they do find empathy and understanding. He is a subjective dramatist, not one of those who remain imperturbably behind the scenes. The son of an Anglican priest, he left Oxford without a degree, and went to London, where he took to acting despite suffering from stage fright. His writing for the theatre dates from when he was a mere twenty-three years

1

The comparison between Otway and Ford is made, for example, by B. Dobrée, ‘Thomas Otway’, in Restoration Tragedy 1660–1720, Oxford 1929, 132–48, with reference to the comic scenes in the tragedies, and to the tragedies themselves (138, 142). However, Otway has never been suspected of being a crypto-Catholic, as one might suppose from his evident belief in eternal life, and the extenuated mysticism of his female protagonists.

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old. His story seems, and is, a carbon copy of Nathaniel Lee’s: a short, sad life made more tragic by his love for the famous and coquettish actress, Elizabeth Barry, who bore his child but preferred Rochester. Six letters collected after his death have survived,2 and might provide the key to a tragedy that turns obsessively on morbid married love which is unceasing and therefore destructive. Psychotic, nomadic, a veteran soldier, a translator, anguished and existentialist, Otway might well have died in the same legendary circumstances as Marlowe and Lee – poverty, starvation, revenge for the murder of a friend. 2. Shakespeare was, by the end of the 1670s, so far in the past that he could be parodied. Indeed Dryden thought he should be. Otway’s two most important plays are a farrago of Shakespearean moments and motives, like the weakening of marital fidelity, the baleful consequences of remorse, or the poisonous working of jealousy. Significantly, one of his minor plays combines a story from Plutarch, the civil war between Marius and Sulla, with the transposition of the tragic love of Romeo and Juliet. I have already indicated the source figures for the female characters; Otway’s husbands vaguely resemble Othello, or Coriolanus, Brutus or Macbeth, but they are lesser, watered-down versions of their Shakespearean originals. As far as dimensions go, too, Otway reduces and compresses his source: his plays are brief and bare; the acts contain not many scenes; the dramatis personae are few. There is unity of action, and therefore no subplot. In terms of construction, dialogues alternate with soliloquies, the latter having both a psychological and informative function, such as when the hero announces his intentions, analyses his state of mind, remembers, dreams and imagines. Ward and Hazlitt considered Otway the greatest English dramatist after Shakespeare and up to Shelley. However, already in the eighteenth century, he was judged to be better in the reading than in the performing. Saintsbury concurred, accusing Otway of a ‘failure on the literary side’.3 Later, Praz

2 3

They can be found in an appendix to four plays by Otway, ed. R. Noel, London 1888. All later, collected editions are replaced by that edited by J. C. Ghosh, 2 vols, Oxford 1932. SAI, 500–1.

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put him on a par with Nathaniel Lee,4 and overstated the anticipations of Decadent Romanticism in the languid masochistic sensibility of his women. The Soldier’s Fortune (1680) is the most read, and therefore most famous, of Otway’s comedies, which, in the light of what I have just said, borders on the enigmatic: how could such a chaste and delicate writer of tragedies turn out such obscene and vulgar work as this? Mimicking quite blatantly Etherege, Otway tells the story of a soldier just home from the war in the Low Countries, who, using the booby as a go-between, cuckolds the husband of his childhood sweetheart, locked in a loveless marriage. The only explanation is that Otway the tragedian had to bow to the demands of the market, but simply was no good at writing comedies.5 3. Otway debuted by translating, or plagiarizing, Racine and Molière and dramas on Greek or Roman subjects. In 1678 he took part in the Dutch campaign, and published his first comedy. There followed the adaptation, or rather, the pastiche of Romeo and Juliet, encapsulated, as we have seen, in the account of the civil war between Marius and Sulla (Caius Marius); but his best work, richest in anticipations, before 1680, is Don Carlos (1676). On principle, a tragedy could not be contemporary, but from now on Otway will place his stories in a series of foreign courts where the political events of the time (including, of course, the Popish Plot and the Exclusion crisis) are present though masked in different guise. In perspective, this is a play in Drydenian couplets, and like Dryden, Otway too was to realize before long the greater agility of blank verse. The portrayal of the court, or the government, is always negative, and frankness and hypocrisy battle it out in a small arena. Anyone who accuses Otway of being an out-and-out Tory, or of siding with the Stuarts, is forgetting the weakness of King Philip, or the corruption of the Venetian senators, even taking into account the determination of Acasto and the incompetence of the conspirators. In Don Carlos the Shakespearean skeleton is Othello and Iago is Gomez who spreads the 4 5

Cf. the essay quoted in § 50.1 n. 14. The continuation of the comedy (The Atheist, also the subtitle of Shadwell’s The Libertine) has been found metadramatic, that is to say, a demonstration of the fragility, indeed futility, of the shotgun weddings that end libertine plays from Etherege onwards. The recent revaluation of Otway’s comedies is unconvincing.

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suspicion of the queen’s infidelity in the mind of the king of Spain, Philip II. The queen is a kind of Gertrude burning with passion, subsequently tamed, for the king’s son, Don Carlos, from whom she has been taken.6 It is impossible for the queen, and especially for Don Carlos, to repress this love. The king sees the awful spectre of incest, and banishes his son, despite the protests of Carlos and the queen that their love is innocent and Platonic. In the farewell scene Otway succeeds in communicating the intense suffering of two innocent but passionate souls, competing in the declarations of mutual devotion. Don Carlos shifts towards the revenge play transposed to relatively recent times, when the king loses his head and wants to eliminate the alleged adulteress and his son. Resembling Desdemona more and more, the queen learns she has been poisoned by the king, who has entered her chamber during the night, at first in disguise and then openly revealing his identity. The king has lost his reason as a result of the slanderous gossip spread by the Duchess of Eboli, who has been spurned by Carlos. By now it is too late to prevent the deaths of the two lovers, deaths which are slow and drawn-out: the poisoned queen continues to yearn for her ascent to heaven, while Carlos lies dying through loss of blood. The king wrings his hands in bitter repentance. It is the final sublimation. Not only Ford, but Crashaw too is echoed in the exalted tones of Baroque mysticism with which he hymns the saints of his Church. 4. The Orphan (1680), a slight chamber play, presents, in a Bohemian setting, prudently far from England, two twin brothers in love with the same woman, Monimia, a ward of their father’s. One of the brothers, Polydore, swaps places with the other, Castalio, in the marriage bed on their first night, and the real husband is turned away by the woman when he arrives. It sounds like a parody of Chaucer or Shakespeare. The Palamon and Arcite whose friendship was destroyed by their love for Emilia, were not brothers, but cousins. In reality, it is not a case of cold, deliberate, Machiavellian adultery, but a misunderstanding: Polydore did not know that Monimia had just married his brother in secret, and Monimia was unaware that the man who had lain with her during the night was not her husband, but his

6

Or it is as if Claudius were in love with Ophelia (SEL, 79).

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brother. Vaguely Oedipal, Polydore realizes he has seduced his sister-in-law. All three die, crushed by the weight of their errors and remorse. In Venice Preserv’d7 (1682), the only play by Otway still regularly performed in theatres round the world, Jaffier hatches a plot in Venice with his friend Pierre to overthrow the ducal regime, but his wife, Belvidera, persuades him to give himself up. The Senate’s promise to spare the conspirators is broken, and Pierre has Jaffier stab him to death on the scaffold. Jaffier then commits suicide. As in Macbeth, the epilogue centres on Belvidera besieged by the bleeding ghosts of her victims. One of the subplots, quite sketchy, but inserted by command of Charles II (who had also urged Dryden to write a poem with the same aim),8 contains explicit allusions to the Popish Plot of 1678 in the form of a senator, Antonio (representing the Earl of Shaftesbury) in a famous scene – Beckettian or Ionescan ante litteram – in which he pretends to be a yelping dog being roundly kicked by the courtesan, Aquilina. 5. Otway’s Shakespearean Venice is once again that of Othello. He omits the courtship and presents the already happily married couple, whose only problem is the opposition of the crusty old father-in-law. Otway perhaps portrayed himself in Jaffier, because this character is not only a fragile romantic, but also a hesitating anti-hero, plagued by bouts of panic. Only Pierre has a clear, unclouded political conscience (though it springs from a private grudge) and sounds like Shakespeare’s Ulysses describing the unhinged world. The plot into which Jaffier is drawn without conviction and real consent, is manoeuvred and controlled by the Spanish and the English, and takes place at night. At the beginning of Act III, the classic Otway dilemma is how much personal ties count compared with the demands of a political action aimed at bringing about a fairer society. For reasons of dramatic time and place, Jaffier must dissociate himself immediately from the plot, since a conspirator has attempted, during the night, to offend the honour of his wife. Wifely honour is more important than the claims of politics, which in any case are confused and presumptuous. Once again, Belvidera wields the power to enslave typical of Otway’s women, while Jaffier exemplifies the congenital weakness of the male. Immediately 7 8

Based on a French text by the Abbé de Saint-Réal. § 51.2.

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after, almost masochistically, Jaffier is ready to undergo all possible forms of punishment to compensate the conspirators for his betrayal. The final act closes with a repetition of Otway’s recurrent scene of the long farewell of the two lovers. § 54. Etherege It is common practice to speak of the ‘famous foursome’ of Restoration comedy, and there is general agreement that the founder of its best-known genre, the comedy of manners, is Sir George Etherege (1634–1691).1 Of course, one should remember the forerunners, first among whom is the often forgotten James Shirley, some of whose plays are equal in spirit and form, if not superior to those of Etherege and his followers. Dryden, too, contributed to the genre, but after Etherege, with Marriage à la Mode. Etherege was no great builder of plots; his great merit lies however in having given the world a number of proverbial characters that have taken their place among the immortals of English comedy: Frollick, Dorimant, Sir Fopling Flutter, Harriet Woodvill – not exactly Falstaffs, but on a par with Shakespeare’s Malvolio, Benedick or Beatrice. Etherege creates a whole new race of characters. Gone are the Jonsonian humours, replaced by real individuals constituting a visible subclass: fops and dandies, assertive ladies, the usual fools, each identified by a particular idiolect. His forte is dialogue, vivid and spirited, in part taken from Molière, in part directly from the streets and salons of the London of his time. Dryden was right: Etherege marks the birth of English dramatic prose. Unlike Dryden, who always sets his plays in exotic places, Etherege’s always take place in London. Can it be said of Etherege that castigat ridendo mores? His contemporaries called him ‘sweet’ and ‘jovial’, therefore innocuous and given to laughter. The rake, Dorimant, appears to repent at the end of his play, but it might be said that Etherege is a realist who limits himself to recording the reality he sees, but also that, ambiguously, his plays are a justification of his own life style and that of the court of which he was part, together with people like Sedley and, especially, Rochester. Faced with the hypocrisy of the self-righteous, the rake’s 1

A number of plays, among them the first theatrical work written by Wycherley, paraphrased the title of Etherege’s Love in a Tub.

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moral duty is to intervene; libertinism is a form of independence, autonomy and freedom. This is a charge of immorality, or amorality, that conditions, compromises and colours the, in general favourable, reception of Etherege up to the end of the nineteenth century. That he wrote only three plays is due, on the one hand, to his laziness, of which he was proud, and on the other, to the fact that he, like Suckling, was a high-class amateur.2 He was less prolific than others because he did not have to write for his supper. He became a diplomat, bringing grace to a profession that had not boasted a man of letters for many years, and spent long periods abroad, where he could write, if he wished, but could not have his plays performed; and comedies must not be left of the shelf to gather dust, but be transferred, piping hot, to the stage. In these foreign missions (France, Constantinople, Regensburg and, perhaps, Sweden) he scandalized the locals with his excesses in eating and drinking, his philandering, and other inappropriate behaviour. These experiences gave rise to a series of letters, and memoirs full of nostalgia and boredom, read in manuscript and first appreciated by Gosse.3 A few insignificant Cavalier-style poems complete his non-dramatic works. 2. Born outside London, and perhaps without a university education, Etherege entered the Inns of Court, a formidable nursery of theatrical talent. He certainly joined his father in Paris at the court in exile of Henrietta Maria, where he saw performances of Molière’s plays. Back in England after the Restoration, he became part of a company of rakes who lived their lives under the banner of levity and licence. At the not young age of forty-three Etherege, with other companions, was involved in a fight in Epsom which ended in a death. He married a rich heiress and was made a knight. In the early 1680s he left Regensburg for Paris, where he joined James II. This has led to conjectures that he may have become a Jacobite (documents kept in the Catholic convent of Regensburg are said to be proof of his conversion). He died in Paris. Four years separate his first from his second play, and eight more years were to pass before the third was ready for the stage. On account of this long gestation, there are clear signs of development in his trio of plays. The Comical Revenge: 2 3

The poet, Suckling, is referred to once by Dorimant, who more often speaks of Waller. The so-called Letterbook, edited by S. Rosenfeld, and published at Oxford in 1928.

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or Love in a Tub (1664) is the debut of a thirty-year-old: the author obviously found it difficult to co-ordinate all of four plots representing four social classes. The story involving the rake, Frollick, and his wooing of a widow, acts as a trait d’union. It is a wide-angle of the unsuspected side of Cromwell’s England (unambiguous allusions indicate that the time of the actions is before 1660). Ordinary people and the well-to-do, too, continue doing what they had done before – having a good time – and humanity is divided into the shrewd and the suckers. It is true that character types in comedy are ageless, and do not get old, but Etherege seems, in this first attempt, to be less than fresh, retailing worn clichés of city life. The search for a desirable wife (or husband), the con tricks, the disguises, the roles (the fop, the blushing maid, the widow, the sturdy captain, the flatterer, the couple of swindlers), and the episodes of knockabout farce,4 together with an elementary semantics of names,5 is all material previously used by Middleton, Jonson, Marston, even Heywood, all of them city playwrights. The valet Dufoy’s mishmash of French and English, an old joke that goes back to Dekker and, beyond, to Shakespeare, is funny, but not for long. The compartmentalization of the plots translates however into a continuous change of dramatic pace and metre, from couplets to extremely colloquial prose, with deliberately strident parodic effects. She Wou’d if She Cou’d (1668), entirely in prose, and much more unitary, has the further merit of having inside and outdoor scenes, as in some ground breaking comedies by Shirley, though the scenes in the gardens and parks of the Change are not particular vivid or realistic. The comedy is based on the obstinate, unrealistic, and therefore funny, attempts by a wealthy couple, the Cockwoods, from out of town, to satisfy their respective erotic appetites during their stay in London. They pretend to be fond of one another, but secretly set about to reach their objectives. The husband frequents pimps and prostitutes in taverns and other places, even when his wife, to punish him for his excesses, 4 5

The revenge of the title is that of the English servants against the supercilious French valet, Dufoy, who, since he has syphilis, is thrust into a special tub used for treating the ‘French disease’. The names of Frollick and Cully contain quite evident scurrilous associations in French and Italian.

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hides his clothes, forcing him to wear some ridiculous makeshift substitutes. At the same time, the two gallants the lady turns to for ‘satisfaction’ are playing a part, and would much rather ensnare two pert young girls who are playing hard to get. Cockwood is a chronic drunk; his wife nags him and punishes him, but, at bottom, puts up with him, making a virtue of necessity, and, reciting the part of the honoured wife, is on the same moral level as her husband. High farce, or melodrama, is reached when husband and wife find themselves at the same rendezvous to consummate their erotic chase. Cockwood, on being discovered, is forced to cover his head with ashes and beg his wife for forgiveness. He keeps on repeating that he is mortified, but as soon as the waters are calm, he sets about planning other ways and means for betraying his wife. Lady Cockwood’s adulteries, too, are always put off, and fail because of a series of problems. She is the first to come to her senses and try not be a slave to her lust, concentrating, instead, on unmasking the two-timing gallant. Just before the end of the play, the unmasker is about to be unmasked herself, and only manages to save herself by the skin of her teeth. The epilogue presents a precarious equilibrium, and leaves open many possible solutions. Etherege’s microcosm is ruled by determinism, a repeating mechanism that grinds both rake and mate. In the end, Lady Cockwood has only schemed to capture the second of the two gallants once she has understood the first one has flown the nest. It is a paradox that the two gallants promise to become the servants of the two sisters they have been courting, provided they agree to marry them. For the moment the two Cockwoods call a truce: but tomorrow? 3. The Man of Mode (1676) mirrors one particular aspect of the life of the time, the society of gallants whose sphere of action has come down to the practice of sexual promiscuity, with, as an accompaniment or sometimes substitute, gossip, banter and duels of wit between the sexes. As in Dryden, but more so, the real people behind the invented characters were easily identifiable by the contemporary audience, of which Etherege was one.6 The documentary value of the play, then, is enormous; it is a record

6

For the identifications of fictitious names see for instance the list given by V. Papetti in her excellent edition of the comedy, Milano 1993, 38–9.

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of late seventeenth-century customs and habits. It opens a window on a world symbolized and dominated by the rake, and provides a cursory, fleeting description of the rest of the society. The scene is not occupied totally by nobles and wealthy merchants; there are also valets, chairmen, prostitutes, ladies’ companions, menservants and maidservants, who obediently carry out the orders of masters who treat them without the least consideration. Right from the opening scene, in medias res, the arrival in Dorimant’s dressing-room of an orange-seller and a shoemaker introduces the second of the two social poles (nobility and labour). Dorimant addresses them in a brutal, bantering manner. The two consecutive scenes are not flattering in their portrayal of an irresponsible exploitation of the lower classes. These representatives of the working class are types, not individuals, and so are called by the name of their trade; abused by their masters, they are however not slow in answering back and intervene one after the other, with the slightest coordination of the voices: theirs is a suspended freedom of speech. Harriet Woodvill’s reason for coming to London is a mystery, or maybe an admission of the tentacular grip the city has on her straitlaced, old-fashioned mother. ‘Wood’ is an element of the surname of the married couple of She Wou’d if She Cou’d; now, a character that embodies the frivolities of the city bears a name in which is embedded the element ‘town’. At the end of the play, Harriet is resigned to going back to the country, to the boring life she led before she experienced the glamour and glitter of London. The second act is interlocutory, but is interesting for the great number of references, of great value for an understanding of English society in the decade 1670–1680: card games, pastimes, reading books, manuals, books of etiquette, and guides to good conversation. Sir Fopling is extraneous to the plot, enters late on in the play and is a kind of ornament. He is the typical Frenchified fop, slow thinking, and possessed of very thin-spread wit. He is a useful pawn for Dorimant in his plan to make his mistress, Loveit, burn with jealousy. True wit is a precious, even, rare, commodity, and not many characters can boast of it. The dialogue is laced with barbs and boutades that are so subtle that the reader has to pause and think in order to understand things that would have been immediately clear to the contemporary audience. Whole scenes are masterpieces of the art of verbal fencing, with the various characters vying in a non-stop sequence of thrusts and parries.

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4. In the previous play we saw an anticipatory semantics of names: a formalist debauchee was called Rakehell. Hogarth was fifty years in the future from Etherege, but The Man of Mode is a ‘Rake’s Progress’ in miniature, or at least ‘a day in the life of a rake’: early morning, enter in dressing gown and slippers; after breakfast and toilette, exit with his henchman, who is also his mediator, called Medley.7 His business today, like every day, is to ‘make a conquest’, or at least plan one. After the conquest, he abandons his prey in order to have the freedom to hunt again: a perfect example of the moral code of the role. With his mistresses, whom he strings along all at the same time, Dorimant implements the erotic policies of Don Juan: he sets one against the other when he wants to get rid of them. Naturally, Bellinda makes Loveit furious by retailing the rumour that Dorimant has been flirting with a fair, masked wench at the theatre. Dorimant explains: ‘We are not masters of our own affections, our inclinations daily alter […] human frailty will have it so’. If Waller is always on his lips, it is because he shares his philosophy, which is, if adorned with more maxims, the muchcelebrated carpe diem. Are there any honest people left in the world? Or in the city? Everything is relative, of course, and a few examples are to be found, but even they are tainted with compromise. Harry Bellair contemplates getting married and saying farewell to his libertine past – obviously a contradiction –, but his father attempts to lay his lewd hands on Emilia, the chaste betrothed of Harry. Harriet Woodvill seems not to be cowed by falsity; she protests and fights in the name of old, authentic values. She considers her rural exile a tomb, and declaims against it. These two authentic characters, Harriet and Harry, can lend one another support, hence the famous scene of the pretended marriage – a drawing room game, a fiction, in which everyone plays a part. Then, the coup de foudre: Harriet has just defamed Dorimant and Dorimant unmasks her and penetrates her armour of reticence. No doubt an unlikely scene, a too sudden, too unexpected rapprochement, but the play would die without a minimum of overlapping or yielding between the two opposing moral positions. It is no coincidence that the action takes place in Hyde Park, the scene of the 7

Easily identifiable as Sedley. It is commonly accepted that Dorimant = Rochester and Fopling = Etherege himself, and that the latter is therefore a benevolent self-portrait.

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glorious hullaballoo in Shirley’s Hyde Park, with the same merry-go-round of characters coming on and going off stage, pronouncing odd lines and bits of sentences. In the park, Dorimant has persuaded Fopling to court Loveit. He is helped in his plan by the very woman he, Dorimant, wishes to seduce, Bellinda. The hullaballoo is repeated in Act IV, the scene of the ball at the residence of Mrs Woodvill, the extoller of solid, traditional values. Here, Dorimant deliberately leads Harriet on; she resists, but not too much. This is part of a rapid succession of scenes with dialogues full of non sequiturs, that tell us much of contemporary society. Act V begins with a furious quarrel between the two neurotic mistresses that have been left by the same man, Dorimant, who ends up by saying a definitive goodbye to Loveit. A disguised sense of unease suggests that Dorimant does not approve of Fopling’s courting of Loveit. As often happens in comedies, the scenic chaos increases, instead of decreasing, owing to a series of misunderstandings: Bellinda thinks Dorimant is once more in love with Loveit when she finds him at her house, while swiftly, too swiftly, Dorimant and Harriet come closer together in the build-up to the unnatural marriage between the old lecher and the chaste Emilia. The positive signals are the same, sudden and short-lived, as those that end She Wou’d if She Cou’d – maybe even stronger, since, besides the solemn promises of faithfulness that Dorimant makes to Harriet, the aged philanderer is, at the last moment, robbed of his bride, who marries his son instead, as is natural. § 55. Wycherley* William Wycherley (1640–1716) differs from Etherege in his powerful personality that has often evoked, with some justification, the name of Jonathan Swift (in particular, with reference to the dramatic, anguished selfportrait of Captain Manly in The Plain Dealer). Wycherley visibly transfers 1

*

Complete Plays, ed. G. Weales, Garden City, NY 1966. E. McCarthy, William Wycherley: A Biography, Athens, GA 1979; J. Thompson, Language in Wycherley’s Plays: Seventeenth-Century Language Theory and Drama, Tuscaloosa, AL 1984; G. A. Marshall, A Great Stage of Fools: Theatricality and Madness on the Plays of William Wycherley, New York 1993; J. Vance, William Wycherley and the Comedy of Fear, Newark, DE 2000.

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into his plays his own personal struggles and doubts. It appears quite clear that there was in him a fracture that could not be made whole: he confessed himself prisoner of a world the immorality of which he denounced but could not disown. In him the humorist and the satirist diverged. He is often defined as ‘sardonic’; he rails and flails but feels he is part of the rot. Some knowledge of his background is indispensable. Like Housman, he was a ‘Shropshire lad’, and at the age of fifteen he spent some time in France in the home of the intelligent and cultured Duchess of Montausier, who shepherded him briefly into the Catholic flock. He enrolled in the University of Oxford (by this time he had reverted to Anglicanism) as a student of philosophy, but took no degree. He left the Inns of Court, likewise, without a profession, and proceeded to live a merry, carefree life. He found favour with the celebrated Duchess of Cleveland, who helped him to a commission in the navy (the Captain Manly connection) and subsequently in a cavalry regiment in 1672. He became tutor to the illegitimate son of Charles II, but was dismissed when it was discovered he had married an heiress, the Countess of Drogheda, whom he had met by chance in a bookshop as she was in the act of buying a copy of one of his plays. She made his life a living hell, subjecting him to exasperating controls. Like Etherege, he wrote at a leisurely, unhurried pace, so that his seventy-six years of life produced only four comedies. He had abandoned the theatre thirty years before, and had spent seven years in the Fleet prison for debt, when he made the acquaintance of the young Alexander Pope, and showed him the poems of his old age (1704). Pope corrected them, and their friendship was over. To tell the truth, every time Wycherley switches from prose to verse in his plays, he comes across as an amateur. It was Pope who claimed that Wycherley had become a Catholic again, while, according to Taine, he lived out the last years of his life a redundant, grey-haired, toothless rake. He received a generous pension from James II, and eleven days before dying, married a prostitute with the sole purpose of preventing his nephew from inheriting his money. 2. Nothing new under the sun, one might say: it’s Etherege all over again; and yet, at a closer look, completely different. Wycherley’s rake is an integral part of a condemned cosmos from which Etherege’s pure characters have fled. In him we have a copy of the hurly-burly of the time, underworlds,

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fashions, fads; Etherege’s transparent characters become more opaque and solid, chunkier and more veined with darkness. Satire is absent in Etherege; Wycherley neither softens nor sweetens, but plunges his knife deep into the wound. Dryden thought his frankness daring but healthy, before the manifest indecency (or such it was thought) of some parts of his plays led to his being ostracized until the early years of the twentieth century. Taine called him ‘the coarsest writer who ever polluted the stage’1 (but Middleton is just as scurrilous, if not more), adding anecdotes to prove his point. Taine pored over Wycherley’s plays and discharged his indignation in some of the most fiercely moralistic pages ever written on him. It must not be forgotten that this was the time when, for similar reasons, Matthew Arnold was busy demolishing Shelley and, with him, Romantic poetry in its entirety. It is an indication of what kind of man Wycherley was that he used to lower the age at which he had debuted and told Pope he had composed his dramas before their documented dates. His four comedies were, in fact, written and performed in the space of five years, but not in a steady crescendo. His masterpiece is the third, The Country Wife. These four plays should be divided into two pairs, the first representing experiment in the form, the second, realization and achievement. 3. Love in a Wood (1671), a situation comedy derived from Calderón,2 with the action moved to London, finds its unity of place in St James’s Park (as is clearly stated in the subtitle), which is the centre of movement, the crossroads, the point of exchange. In and from this open air stage, characters moved by desire for money or for sex hatch their various plots and intrigues, weaving a web of error and equivocation, favoured by the insidious fashion of the day of walking in the park with their faces hidden behind masks. As often happens with first plays, the comedy has too many characters, who, given the limited space and time provided by the conventional five acts, cannot be adequately drawn. Furthermore, the plot is far from clear, and loses itself in a maze of separate storylines. Echoes of some

1 2

TAI, vol. II, 357. Wycherley is thought by some to have had a position at the English embassy in Madrid in 1664–1665.

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of Jonson’s later comedies resonate not only in the satirical portrait of the hypocritical Puritan, who behind all his show of piety is a lecher, but also in the overt, Carnivalesque semantics of the names, which are even coarser than the average at the time. So that, to describe the play one might start from various points of view, and from one of the many characters, and end up by doubting whether there is, in fact, a main character, and whether, instead, this is not a choral work. The plot action in itself shows the various ways in which the female engages with the male, bearing in mind that interest, not love, is the driving force. We have the impression that chance presides over the coupling of the characters, hence the ambiguity inherent in the title (‘wood’ is an archaism meaning ‘mad’, and the title therefore also means ‘love in a state of confusion’). Widow Flippant, like Mrs Cockwood in Etherege, is desperately in search of any male whatsoever to satisfy her lust. The stratagems used are the same, and just as unsuccessful. A colourless ‘wit’, called, programmatically, Dapperwit, becomes the happy husband of a woman already six months pregnant, who does not know who the father is and marries only to save her ‘honour’. Gripe, a Puritan, marries a prostitute, convinced that a wife costs less to keep than a mistress. Two rakish friends play with fire, as usual, in a game of deceit, each attempting to seduce the other’s woman (see Dryden’s Marriage à la Mode), only to justify themselves at the end by saying it was all a misunderstanding, and praising marriage as the beginning, rather than the end, of their freedom. The cynical, mischievous duplicity of the procuresses, and the scheming dishonesty of the mothers, who pretend to care about their daughters’ honour and then sell their bodies to the highest bidder – all this takes us back half a century to the dark, grotesque world of a Middleton. The Gentleman Dancing Master (1671), again based on Calderón and Lope, shows little real advance on the first play, though construction and aims are so different as to argue a turnabout, however temporary. It is less fragmented, but more static; it turns a fixed lens on interiors that never change, except in one case. The scenes are few and very long (unlike the crowded, rapidly moving pictures of Love in a Wood), and consist largely of inconclusive dialogues. The leisurely pace is made even slower by the sudden lack of material, the reduction of the number of characters, and the elimination of the multiplot construction. Nor is it a second ‘rake’s comedy’, although

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it satirizes a certain kind of fop and two cases of ridiculous affectation. It is better defined as a rather implausible farce aimed at satirizing the infatuation with all things Spanish and French that had evidently become proverbial at the time. Act III presents the ludicrous argument between Don Diego – the alias of an Englishman with the eloquent name of James Formal – and another Englishman, who calls himself Monsieur de Paris, speaks his native tongue with a French accent, and is betrothed to the former’s daughter. Their disagreement is about which are superior, French or Spanish manners. The outcome is shown in Act IV, in a sort of pantomime, with Monsieur who enters in exaggeratedly Spanish garb, like another version of Malvolio. Both Don Diego and Monsieur are duped by Hippolita, Diego’s fourteen-year-old daughter who is meant to represent the essence of Englishness insofar as she is pragmatic, clear-thinking, enterprising, downto-earth, humorous and self-mocking. She is backed up by her maidservant, Prue, who is as positive and quick-thinking as her mistress. The plot of the astute Hippolita who refuses the hand of the murky Monsieur,3 and opens her door to suitor Gerrard, passing him off as a dancing master, reads like something from an eighteenth-century opera buffa fifty years before its time, in a period when music was dominated by the oratorio, or by operas on mythological and epic themes. The chaste, but codified, language used by pupil and counterfeit master in the presence of outsiders is a device that Wycherley has learnt and keeps up his sleeve. Aunt Caution realizes immediately what is going on (though she does not succeed in opening her stubborn brother’s eyes), and is therefore a true ‘wit’, for Wycherley part of an intellectual elite which, obviously, excludes all those fools who are blinded by self-worship. Marriage to Monsieur is avoided because he believes, to the very end, that he is the betrothed, while all the time he is furthering his rival and favouring his success, to his own detriment. He has always believed that Hippolita was playing a game with the fake dancing master. The wedding is celebrated with the accelerated speed of the farce, the wool pulled over the eyes of father and would-be groom as they argue

3

Hippolita protests against the cynical rule that it is unfashionable to be choosy, and ‘refuse a husband only because he is stupid’.

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about insignificant matters of etiquette. The priest blesses the union of Hyppolita and Gerrard, and the others are left open-mouthed, though Don Diego at the end claims to have understood everything and to have connived without saying anything. 4. To call The Country Wife (1675) simply ‘a comedy’ would be inadequate and misleading: there are no purely comic scenes; the whole play is pervaded by disquiet, and seems to be the product of a mind and a psyche that have only just attained the necessary capacity of objectivization. We must force the definition to include, at the very least, the label of ‘dark, powerful comedy’. Wycherley assimilates and personalizes Molière and Terence: the entire dramatic space is invaded and filled, obsessively, with the symbol of the cuckold – horns. The whole world is reduced to horns and cornification, starting with the name of Horner, the protagonist, or one of the protagonists. Curiously, in the title, Wycherley shifts the emphasis from the cuckolder, and the cuckold, to the country wife. From the point of view of the structure, we are back to closely knitted plots, and it is not altogether fanciful to think that Aldous Huxley may have had this play in mind as he sat down to write Point Counterpoint. Thanks to a particular stratagem, Horner obtains free access to the noble ladies of the town; Harcourt, a reformed, or repressed, rake, wins the hand of Alithea, betrothed to the fop, Sparkish, who is not, like Flutter, a wouldbe wit spurned by real wits, but a poor, pitiful, fumbling fool. So, there are many protagonists, though one might say that the foremost is the jealous Pinchwife, the most dramatic, suffering, deeply explored of all the characters in the play. This time, the interplay of the various plots is handled in a truly masterly fashion, and the switch from one to the other is smooth and confident, making this one of the most often performed works, right up to the present day, of the entire repertoire of English drama. While the barrage of wit can at times be overwhelming, there are several scenes and situations of pure, delightful theatre, as, for example, when Margery, the country wife, substitutes the letter, thus outwitting her husband, or the famous ‘china’ scene, a non-stop competition of sexual double-entendres.4 4

From behind the locked bedroom door comes the sound of a conversation, half-heard and completely misunderstood, between Horner and Lady Fidget, on the subject

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On the whole, The Country Wife is a paradoxical, perhaps exaggerated, study of behaviour in the capital in the 1670s. The curtain goes up on an apparent anomaly, Horner’s sexual impotence, a Butlerian disease out of Erewhon, that is a kind of inverted sin or moral misdemeanour, turning the bearer into a filthy, shunned creature, a monster, or devil that must be exorcised. The play may even be seen as a denunciation of gender discrimination, and of its psychoses, centuries ahead of its time. The women ought to pity Horner the eunuch, or be indifferent to him, but instead cry scandal and a general uprising is announced. The starting point is therefore paradoxical: the husbands rejoice in the belief that their wives and mistresses run no risk from Horner. Seduction is everywhere in this society, and husbands and wives keep a strict watch on one another. There is moral chaos, and a falsely cheerful air typical of desperate circumstances; throughout, one hears the toll of the bell signalling that their world has reached its terminus. The repartee whirls madly round in a system near collapse, misunderstood by both speaker and listener. In a world dominated by words, speech at times is not understood. In two clear cases, appearances win over reality, or characters fall into mind-boggling misconceptions. 5. Society in The Country Wife is divided into three categories: cuckolders, unfaithful wives, and jealous husbands, as in a well-balanced economic system of supply and demand. The play, as I said, might just as well be named after Pinchwife, a cuckold who thinks he can find himself a faithful wife in the country, and, on bringing her to London, tries in vain to keep her out of danger and temptation by locking her up.5 In Act IV, Pinchwife’s jealousy reaches a level of fury worthy of Othello.6 Jealousy is the death of reason, and it is typical of Wycherley that Margery’s compromising letter to Horner should be delivered by her husband, who also

5 6

of china, a euphemism for copulation. Similarly, in an earlier scene, Margery comes back down the path in the park, where she has had a tryst with Horner, carrying an orange in her hand. Pinchwife (lucus a non lucendo, that is a ‘robber of wives’) would not go along with Gripe in Love in a Wood, who thinks it better to have a mistress than a wife. Pinchwife threatens to disfigure his wife by carving the word ‘whore’ on her face with his knife.

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excogitates the plan to marry off his sister to Horner, telling himself ‘it is better have him as a brother-in-law than be cuckolded by him’. Sparkish’s delirium is the opposite of Pinchwife’s jealousy, because he authorizes his friend Harcourt’s unceasing assault on his fiancée, Alithea, and by dint of playing with fire, ends up by being well and truly burnt. Alithea is a clear example of the lack of opportunities, the predestination, or determinism, of Restoration society: only in the country, far from the city, is it possible to preserve conjugal chastity, but the country is so boring and the city so full of life. So The Country Wife is a play of crescendos – not so much of Horner’s lust, which is constant in its masked intensity to the very end, but of the psychopathology of Pinchwife and Sparkish. The character of Horner marks a return to the great theme of the rake. Horner strikes indiscriminately, like a caustic, atheist philosopher, an Epicurean or Sceptic, surrounded by a crowd of other rakes, who listen, and retort with mocking, sacrilegious quips, in a prodigious display of nonsense and antithesis. He is a bitter, sardonic intellectual, a cold, calculating sensualist, who at one point refers to himself as ‘a Machiavelli in love’. In Act V improbability raises its head when Pinchwife, blinded by jealousy, fails to recognize his wife disguised as Alithea, and personally hands her over to Horner, who is meant to think she is Alithea. Pinchwife is the only one who does not realize how things stand. Margery is really in love, and intends to leave her husband, whatever the consequences for her reputation and honour. She appeals to Horner, calling him her second husband. When, before the whole assembly of characters, Horner is once more confirmed as being a eunuch, Margery, the only one that, naïvely, wants to tell the truth, is silenced. The deception continues, and the play ends on the dance of the unwitting cuckolds. 6. When Wycherley wrote The Country Wife he was truly inspired; in The Plain Dealer7 (1676) inspiration is gone. The play struggles to take off, but is too slow and cumbersome to succeed. It is evidently a ‘play with a purpose’ but has no energy to sustain it. If previously Wycherley divided himself into a number of different characters, he now abandons this ­technique and 7

Wycherley dedicated the play to a famous procuress, causing quite some stir at the time.

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identifies with the sea captain, Manly. He has thrown down the mask, and, in order to implement his satirical agenda, opts for this single character, alone against the world, through whom he now attacks, not libertinism8 – unless one considers his betrothed, but faithless Olivia, a female rake – but hypocrisy. In The Country Wife, horns were the fundamental metaphor; here, hypocrisy is the obsession. In the meantime, Wycherley has felt surfacing within himself a previously unknown and aggressive misogyny. Olivia, too, complains that the world is ‘out of joint’, but her protest rings false: she preaches well against all forms of dishonesty, but in practice is guilty of the most ignoble actions, performed with great nonchalance. Manly plays a completely different tune to Horner: he does not exploit the dominant hypocrisy of society to satisfy his lust or greed, but bitterly denounces the very world Horner feels at home in. He execrates what Horner wallows in, a world of pimps, prostitutes, flatterers, fools and, especially, fops. We do not know what Horner’s profession is, if indeed he has one. Of Manly, instead, we know that he is just back from an unfortunate naval expedition against the Dutch, and has rendered a great service to his country. Horner is gloriously promiscuous, Manly monogamous, and it is only his monogamous love that compromises his unbending uprightness. Were it not for the love he has sworn Olivia, he would, once disillusioned, leave his native shores and sail off towards the Indies. He announces this much when he comes on, with short, peremptory statements expressing scorn and disgust, and giving brusque military orders. The second reason that prevents him from emigrating, and rekindles the flame of hope, is knowing he has a friend, a true friend (so he thinks), one Vernish, whose name conveys the idea of superficiality and falseness. To Vernish, Manly has entrusted his wealth and, above all, his future wife. The plot, essentially, recounts Manly’s discovery of both Olivia’s true nature – in his absence, she has seduced and married Vernish – and the treachery of his supposed friend. He decides to take revenge on both, and shame them in public. The denouement also involves the identity of a mysterious Fidelia, who follows the captain like 8

There is a scene in which a group of beau monde characters, who have just seen a performance of The Country Wife, discuss it briefly, and then proclaim that ‘china is out of fashion’!

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a devoted shadow, and is in fact a nobleman’s daughter who has fallen in love with Manly at first sight, having witnessed his heroism in action. In the last scene, the captain rewards the faithful love of his pretended page, and the couple set off for the new world. With this, the play, which began as an argumentative satire against the moral degeneration of the time, moves gradually towards the atmosphere of romance and even of Romanticism. Based, as we know, on Molière’s Le Misanthrope, the real model is, however, clearly Shakespearean: Fidelia dressed as a page, and determined to follow the captain in this disguise, takes us straight back to Twelfth Night. The name ‘Fidelia’, furthermore, reminds of the ‘Fidele’ in Cymbeline, while Olivia is, of course, another link with Twelfth Night. But it is obvious that Manly cites and resembles Timon of Athens, both because he deludes himself that he can act for the benefit of his fellow men, and because he entrusts all he owns to a faithless friend, and ends up in poverty. Like all good Elizabethan plays, The Plain Dealer alternates the main plot with a subplot, the latter being entrusted to the widow Blackacre, a character that churns out an endless stream of jokes in an insipid storyline that could well be suppressed without excessive damage to the integrity of the work.9 § 56. Congreve William Congreve (1670–1729) is, at least in my opinion, much overrated. It is true that he has been called the greatest writer of comedy in the whole of English drama, comparable to Shakespeare and Jonson. Such an assessment, however, is unjustified and is based on only five plays, four of them comedies. Of these, only the last one can in any way be considered a masterpiece, while of the others, two are mediocre, not to say poor, while 9

Acts IV and V come quite close to capturing the suspense of the Shakespearean ‘comedies of errors’. Fidelia, hiding her true feelings, tells Manly (who is desperately trying to win back Olivia, forgetting, or maybe even aware, that she is already married), that Olivia refuses him because she is in love with her, that is, Fidelia. A midnight meeting is arranged, during which Olivia, under the cloak of night, will be able to enjoy the company of Fidelia, who she believes is a man. If Olivia is deceptive, Vernish is no less: when he discovers that Fidelia is indeed a woman, he attempts to rape her. She is saved at the last moment. Manly avenges himself on Vernish by telling him that Olivia is having an affair with a man dressed as a woman, whereas it is the opposite.

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the third is a little better, though uneven. All four leave much to be desired in terms of plot construction; but it cannot be denied that Congreve gradually manages to create a number of unforgettable examples of ‘humours’, who express themselves through some of the most scintillating dialogue ever written for the stage. Congreve’s humour is, of course, far from obvious and vulgar. In short, there is no bar-room bawdy here. These qualities of Congreve’s art were widely acknowledged in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. In the nineteenth he fell foul of Victorian moralism. While Lamb defended, Macaulay deplored. Byron and Swinburne1 liked him, declaring that he was the last outpost of English comedy before the desert of the eighteenth century. In the context of English drama, Congreve is seen essentially as a forerunner of Wilde, while in wider terms his name has been linked to Goldoni and Chekov, and from a stylistic point of view, Flaubert. Never much an object of study,2 his main works are regularly performed to this day, the principal roles coveted by important actors and actresses. With reference to Restoration comedy, Congreve is closer to Etherege than to Wycherley, though he himself recognized that he ought to be likened to the author of The Country Wife: his second play, in fact, can be read as a kind of parody of Wycherley’s fourth, The Plain Dealer, with Congreve intent on creating a semi-comic, and, therefore also semi-tragic, version of Manly. However, there is a marked difference in dramatic temperament between the two: Wycherley is rough and unpolished compared with Congreve, who, on the other hand, lacks all sense of scenic effects and depth of character. Wycherley’s Manly and Congreve’s Maskwell stand on opposite sides of a moral divide, but, given this, Manly dwarfs Maskwell in purely dramatic terms. In his first two plays, Congreve is a world-weary playwright who observes his puppets from the wings, detached and uncaring. He is careful not to cross the line of objectivization: as we have seen, Wycherley enters into one of his characters and uses it as a mouthpiece. Congreve builds plots which are never too long or over-elaborate, founded 1 2

A commemorative article written for the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The complete works have only recently been republished, edited by D. F. MacKenzie, 3 vols, Oxford 2011, reviewed at great length by C. Rawson in TLS (20 January 2012, 3–5).

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on elusive and exclusive wit, and aimed at a discerning audience of connoisseurs. He is clearly a playwright familiar with everything written for the theatre from Shakespeare onwards, and on this loom he weaves a web of echoes and allusions. To give only one example of this intertextuality, in Act IV Scene 1 of The Double-Dealer, Lord Touchwood threatens to carve the word ‘villain’ on his nephew’s face with the tip of his sword; this echoes a scene in The Country Wife, when Pinchwife threatens his wife in similar terms. One of the consequences of Congreve’s control of his material is that he avoids the excesses and hyperbole of melodrama: he is never ‘theatrical’ in the derogatory sense of the word. His comedies are remembered not so much for particular scenes as for certain dialogues, or individual lines – even single short sentences. His first two plays present minimal plots and very few events. Congreve is the most economical and least exploitative of playwrights, and yet the chain of events, few as they are, is forever being interrupted to follow secondary or collateral actions. Congreve’s humour is quite different to the hearty laughter of, say, Fielding, or even the smile of Sterne. We might call it detached, or dry, or deadpan. 2. Congreve was born in 1670, and was therefore spared the Civil War and deprived of the Restoration. His adolescence was out of the common way too: he was the son of an English soldier, who was sent to Ireland where William grew up. He studied at Trinity College, Dublin, where he met fellow student Swift. He returned to England just before the Glorious Revolution. By this time he had abandoned his law studies and started writing. His first literary work was a short novel, Incognita, which has recently been revaluated as an interesting example of early prose fiction. His first play, written when he was only twenty-three, was actually performed some twenty years after his second and third, and therefore, strictly speaking, outside the time frame of Restoration theatre. The four successive plays straddle 1698 and Collier’s attack on the immorality of the stage, with evident effects on subsequent drama, especially The Way of the World. After 1700 Congreve was given various government sinecures, even though he was a Whig. He disappointed Voltaire by pretending not to care about his playwriting past (a ‘gentilhomme comme un autre’); he translated the classics, wrote another novel, several poems, and, above all, a libretto, Semele, which, years later, was set by Handel. Pope dedicated his Iliad to him. He

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died following a coach accident, like Lee.3 It is still not clear why he ended his career at the age of thirty, after giving such signs of promise in a mere five years. His last play was not exactly booed, but received a less than warm reception, although the author thought it was his best. Congreve was highly sensitive, touchy, even, and perhaps the cool response to his play played some part in his decision to abandon the stage; he may have realized that his kind of comedy had, by now, no future, or he may have had a crisis of conscience at having shone the spotlight on immorality. He had concentrated on destruction (of vice) rather than construction (of virtue). Dryden had adopted him and launched him on his career, pronouncing The Old Bachelor4 (1693) the best first play he had ever read. The cast, all Londoners, consists of eight main characters, of which two are rakes in search of fun and games before they get married (one of them exhibits prophetically existentialist traits); there is also a couple consisting of a jealous husband, excessively watchful of his wife and just as deceived, while the wife puts on saintly airs but is ready to cuckold him whenever she can; another female character has been abandoned by one of the two rakes, and is lusted after by the old bachelor of the title. The play ends with the celebration of various weddings, some of them bizarre but genuine, others false. The host of secondary characters includes valets, maids, lady companions, pimps, and above all, the odd duo of a knight and his squire, the very image of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, to whom they are explicitly compared in the course of the play. Congreve’s skill as a playwright emerges in the rapier thrust of the dialogue, which often alludes to real contemporary events, and in the lively, sometimes, extravagant style. The dialogue is based on lines openly addressed to other characters, usually full of high-minded sentiments and ideals, and others spoken aside, heard only by the audience, that reveal what the character is really thinking, and plotting. Starting with this first play, Congreve shows his firm control, both synthetic and 3

4

Congreve died unmarried. In his will he left 200 pounds to the actress, Anne Bracegirdle, and five times that amount to his mistress, the Duchess of Marlborough, from whom he had had a daughter. The Duchess revered his memory, and commissioned an ivory statue of him, which she considered endowed with life. Containing some songs set by Purcell.

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elliptic, over his material. The Old Bachelor is immensely readable, and is the first of the four that cuts by half the average length of previous plays, in particular, Wycherley’s. However, for all that, it is slight, schematic, and cold, only occasionally warmed by the occasional comic ploy.5 Though said to have been revised by Dryden, and fairly successful on stage, it remains a mediocre play. 3. The Double Dealer (1694), less well received by audiences, is based on the unities of place and time – Dryden’s twenty-four hours. The plot benefits from these restrictions, and is made slightly more dynamic and gripping by the intrigues of two villains. The pace is slowed by Congreve’s dwelling on various satirical figures and scenes: the foolishness of the idle, lazy rich – their fads, fashions, infatuations and foibles – is the same timeless vanity scourged by Dickens 100 and more years later; like him, Congreve targets snobbery and superciliousness, though in a less exuberant and imaginative manner. The love of Mellefont and Cynthia is opposed by Lady Touchwood and the villain, Maskwell, who wants Cynthia for himself, while her heart beats only for Mellefont, who is soon the victim of a vicious rumour that he is the lover of the wives of two lords. The play begins in medias res with the passionate love of an aunt for her nephew, who is betrothed to Cynthia. This promising, dynamic incipit soon gives way to static verbal duels with great display of the dry, intellectual, artificial wit that will become the trademark of Congreve from now on; but then he terminates the duel, and limits himself to hints which will be picked up by the discerning ear. The plot involving the mature married woman in the grip of passionate desire,

5

One of these involves the quixotic knight who is inveigled into handing over a large reward by a trickster, on the grounds that the evening before he had saved the knight who was being attacked by a gang of outlaws. His right-hand man is a kind of miles gloriosus, one of a rich tradition of such characters, not just in classical but in English literature too. He excels in braggadocio and linguistic blunders, but is in fact a miserable coward. The second comic situation is when Fondlewife’s young wife (her name is obviously meant to recall Wycherley’s Pinchwife) finds herself in bed with the fop, Bellmour, disguised as a priest. On the arrival of the husband, the seducer is hurriedly shoved into a cupboard. The wife is spared embarrassment, and the husband the knowledge that he has been, and will be, cuckolded.

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and her tool, Maskwell, progresses through a series of scenes parodying the darkest and bloodiest of Elizabethan tragedies, with the treacherous Maskwell resembling more and more the typical Machiavellian villain of Shakespeare. Farce undermines the accusation levelled at Mellefont by his future mother-in-law that he had attempted to molest her, thereby coming close to the dreadful sin of incest (though she is only Cynthia’s stepmother). The second act, too, is punctuated by interludes and scenes based on the figure of the feather-brained, conceited kind of woman who writes pastorals as a hobby, and leads her husband round on a leash. The betrothed couple, a feature to be found in the following plays as well, are ironic, indeed pessimistic regarding their prospects of marriage, and have a clear vision of the stupidity by which they are surrounded. In the course of the play, one finely crafted satirical portrait follows another. Maskwell’s villainy is tripled when he adds the lady to his victims by not revealing that his real aim is Cynthia’s hand; Mellefont accepts a trap that, as expected, discredits him with his uncle. In short, Maskwell adds victory to victory, and persuades Cynthia to marry him. In the end, he is unmasked, his murder by the lady is forestalled, and the happy ending is served up. 4. In Love for Love (1695) Congreve ‘the entertainer’ passively follows the chatter of a small group of characters representing London society at the end of the seventeenth century, with no attempt to hide its immorality, which is, indeed, treated with indulgence. There are no real villains in the play, with the possible exception of Valentine’s father, but the moral fragility is both incurable and, in some cases, quite charming. Some of the morally weak are foolish, others are intelligent, and this appears to be the true dividing line. In the middle, Congreve places once again two pure, or almost pure, characters, who really love one another. Valentine is a reformed rake with several illegitimate children. The dramatis personae are many and varied, each with an equally important role in the story, which is essentially about the poet-playwright, Valentine, and the heiress, Angelica. Like all poets, Valentine is a dreamer with little experience with money. When the curtain comes up, he is besieged by creditors and offered by his father just enough to pay his debts provided he accepts to make over his inheritance to his younger brother. He may possibly be seen as a reflection of Congreve himself, denouncing the muzzles on contemporary

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theatre and the restrictions on the freedom of expression. The initial phases resound with references to the theatrical practice of the day, and would have been immediately understood by the audience. In part, Valentine is the voice of truth, and as such, Congreve’s mouthpiece; himself immune and untouched, he speaks out against prevailing stupidity and hypocrisy. True love can only be crowned after various scenes in which all the other characters make great show of their several aims and obsessions. First of all, Valentine’s two friends: they, endowed with greater practicality, spend all they have on having a good time with the ladies, who are only too happy to go along with them. The pace is slow and leisurely, as proved by the space Congreve gives these secondary characters. Each has a bug, a fixation, an eccentricity, so much so that The Eccentrics might well be the subtitle, or alternative title, of this play. Foresight is so obsessed with astrology that he does not see that his wife is betraying him before his very eyes. However, the strength of Love for Love lies in its verbal, or stylistic, characterization: each character is identified by means of an idiolect formed of images, metaphors and expressions deriving from their respective fixations. The best example of this is Ben, Valentine’s brother, who has just come back from long sea journeys (another anticipation of Dickens). He is destined to inherit his father’s fortune, and is given a naïve Prue, who, completely devoid of the hypocrisy of society, and innocent compared with the other ladies of the beau monde, must be schooled in coyness and the art of flirtation. In Act IV, Valentine refuses to sign over their father’s fortune to his brother by means of an old Elizabethan ploy – he pretends to be mad, like Kyd’s Hieronimo, or Hamlet. The hypocritical father tries in vain to calm him down: Ben, true to himself as a real outsider, will take to the sea once again, in a symbolic, and concrete, rejection of the world of falsity and deception he has just experienced. Equally unexpected is the final scene, in which Valentine’s father expresses his desire to marry Angelica, and very nearly does. In the end, Congreve rewards the reformed Valentine’s altruistic love for Angelica, who manages to foil the father’s immoral plan. Congreve turns a blind eye on much that is wrong in the world, and with the other, good one, sees a society on the move again, redeemed by the two real lovers that represent honesty and authenticity.

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5. After The Mourning Bride6 (1697), an unconvincing post-Elizabethan tragedy, but appreciated at the time, and for many years a staple of theatrical repertoire, Congreve wrote The Way of the World (1700), his masterpiece and one of the great English comedies of all time. It was, however, neither appreciated nor understood by contemporary audiences. In other words, it was something of a flop, owing, it was generally believed, to the over-elaborate plot, and its refined, sophisticated literary tone. The title has become a byword, and conveys the ambitious idea of representing the society of the day. The Way of the World is programmatically realistic, or pseudo-realistic, and eavesdrops on a group of characters from the moneyed class, revealing their aspirations, habits and moral demeanour. Foremost in their thoughts are the intrigues and love affairs of fops and ladies, young and not so young. Vanity is shared by hot-blooded, though grey-haired, widows; love is no romantic passion but a calculating feeling combined with self-interest, that finds fulfilment only if accompanied by the handing over of a conspicuous sum of money. Under the magnifying glass of Congreve and his colleagues, the society of the time is revealed in its horizontal and vertical stratification: servants are important in the plot, and provide linguistic counterpoint with their witty lines, jokes, malapropisms (ante litteram), and the colourful turns of phrase typical of unsophisticated speech; the servants also lend their willing support in the various intrigues set in motion by their masters.7 For the second time, Congreve brings on stage an outsider, this time the rustic Sir Wilfull, who, under his unpolished exterior, hides many priceless qualities that point the difference in life, customs, and moral fibre between town and country. This is a repetition of the opposition between Ben and Valentine in the previous play, the band of merrymakers relativized by great, noisy gaffes. As in the other 6

7

Almeria, the daughter of King Manuel of Granada, has secretly married Alfonso, the son of the King of Valencia, his father’s enemy. The irate father and the rival lady, Zara, a Moorish queen (as in Dryden), are eliminated in the end. A soliloquy by the leading lady in Act II was highly praised by Johnson, and several trenchant aphorisms found in the dialogues have become famous. It is frankly hard to believe that the valet Waitwell should agree to marry Foible, the governess, only so as to play the part of Lady Wishfort’s suitor.

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plays, there are no sensational events here: the first scene, set in a chocolate house, presents a normal conversation among idle fops during a game of cards. There follows a long scene which illustrates the stratagems used by women to deceive their husbands, flirt and carry on, in what appears to be a war of attrition. Acts III, IV and V form a macro-sequence, marked by absolute unity of time and place, set in Lady Wishfort’s rooms. In one of the most memorable pieces of theatre in the English language, a great orchestra strikes up, in which the instruments are the various characters of the cast, who enter and exit in turn, giving rise to a dazzling display of verbal acrobatics aimed at illustrating, or hiding, legal designs and loopholes that are too complicated and contorted to be summarized. Mirabell tries to make her aunt consent to his marriage to Millamant by means of blackmail: his servant, Waitwell, pretends to be an aristocratic suitor; if she succumbs, she can hardly refuse Mirabell’s request. Lady Wishfort steals the stage as an incomparable portrait of female vanity and senile lasciviousness. In the final part, Congreve’s play is a closely woven web of intertextual references to the wealth of English comedy. Lady Marwood’s ‘aversion’ is the same interjection as used by Wycherley’s Olivia, and all the aristocratic characters, through their author, consciously or unconsciously quote works, passages, or single words from Shakespeare, Cervantes, Jonson, Suckling and Waller. In the light of this mise en abyme, one incidental annotation is a list of the most read and discussed books of the day (Bunyan, Collier, Quarles, Prynne), fresh from the printer’s and placed for consultation on the mantelpiece. The attentive audience would have recognized, after an allusion to Jonson’s Volpone, the veiled parody, or double parody, of Cleopatra’s barge on the Cydnus, as described by both Shakespeare and Dryden. All through the fourth act, Millamant sings songs by Suckling as she weighs up whether or not to accept the advances of Sir Wilfull. 6. Congreve’s play closes with the unmasking of the two main villains, the last-minute repentance of other minor characters, and the muted, almost forced, endorsement of current morality and resigned acceptance of the imperfections and peccadillos of society. Mirabell and Millamant are the usual exceptions: Mirabell is not a hypocrite, and knows full well that whoever does not indulge in dissimulation is destined to remain an outsider. The rules governing ‘polite society’ are the opposite of the rules

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of nature: one of Mirabell’s first speeches is centred on the efforts normally made to blacken a lady’s reputation, which are seen as an improvement. Mirabell and Millamant are positive characters given the conditions of the time: they love one another, but in a perfectly balanced way, like true seventeenth-century wits, without displays of overwhelming passion; cool and self-controlled, they are aware that if they lose 6,000 pounds, their marriage goes up in smoke. In Act II, too, in the park, the two embittered ladies who converse on men’s infidelity, put forward an unnatural code of ethics: let their modus operandi be, they say, deception; let their husbands believe they are being cuckolded, and suffer for it. The ‘proviso scene’ in Act IV, between Mirabell and Millamant, is rightly considered to be a locus classicus of this masterpiece: the two lovers negotiate the liberties they will enjoy once married, and Millamant, tired and sick of conventions, sketches a utopia of antithetic values, a new world, quite different to the present. Mirabell listens impassively, a detached, ironic participant in the game. Millamant’s famous closing comment, ‘These articles subscribed, […] I may by degrees dwindle into a wife’, must be the most unromantic acceptance of a proposal of marriage in the whole of English comedy. In Act V, cynicism is replaced by an urge for more authentic rules. The attempts at blackmail are foiled, the lecherous aunt foregoes her desire for revenge on the ungrateful lover who prefers the niece, and the one small coalition that risks blowing everything sky high is defused. With this, Congreve reaffirms that his society is not, after all, rotten to the very core. § 57. Shadwell* I: Farces against foreign fads Thomas Shadwell (1642–1692) is naturally remembered above all as Dryden’s number one enemy, so famously pilloried in Mac Flecknoe.1 Though elevated to the status of Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal (much to Dryden’s chagrin), Shadwell has never enjoyed much critical *

Complete Works, ed. M. Summers, 5 vols, London 1927. A. S. Borgman, Thomas Shadwell: His Life and Comedies, New York 1928; D. R. Kunz, The Drama of Thomas Shadwell, Salzburg 1972; A. Steiger, Thomas Shadwell ‘Libertine’, Hildesheim 1975.

1

§ 51.3.

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approval: indeed, he was, and is, generally considered less than mediocre as a playwright. So Dryden would seem to have been right in his estimation of his rival’s high quotient of ‘dullness’. Saintsbury saw in Shadwell three serious defects: scurrility of language, monotony, and insipid dialogues. We might add a fourth: the lack of variety and monotony of his plots, which he appears to repeat unendingly. The highest praise is that his best works – four or five, or a fifth of his total output – are on the same level as the worst of the best playwrights of the time. He is still not much read today, and his plays have not been republished recently, at least in their entirety.2 As a kind of natural reaction against this prevailing disparagement, Shadwell has had the occasional enthusiastic champion. That all is relative may be deduced from the very conferment of the Laureateship on such a presumed nullity, though one should take into account that between Wycherley’s last play and Congreve’s first (approximately from 1677 to 1692) the theatre, and literature in general, were in the doldrums: there were no exciting playwrights around, and no poets either, apart from the omnipresent Dryden. Born in Norfolk, educated at Cambridge and the Inns of Court, by the early 1680s Shadwell had become a professional playwright, not a gifted amateur.3 His temperament can be seen in his dislike and condemnation of every kind of foreign fashion and affectation, especially French, as opposed to genuine Englishness. The fop is everywhere in Shadwell, and is the object of unceasing attack by the playwright. Every play features one of them, and he is always fooled and mocked in the course of the action. Nor does the ‘wit’ fare better, unless he happens to be an ‘anti-wit’, in tacit polemic with Wycherley and (prophetically) Congreve. Another of Shadwell’s favourite butts is the fainting poet and his sugared sonnets. It is as though he had gradually built up a conservative bulwark

2

3

We learn from SAI, 487, n. 1, that many copies of the 1720 four-volume edition were destroyed in a fire. Saintsbury himself edited a selection of four plays, London 1903. The Libertine is included in Libertine Plays of the Restoration, ed. G. Manning, London 2001. Right from the very beginning of his career, Shadwell never wrote less than one play per year. In the course of his fifteen-year career he managed a total of seventeen or eighteen works for the stage.

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against the rising immorality that was undermining the nouveaux riches of the upper-middle class, intent on ineptly aping the (mis)ruling aristocracy. Shadwell often focuses on the lowest of society, sometimes even on the criminal underworld, but never on the aristocracy and the court. Almost every play of his can be seen as a debate on the relative merits of town and country, this latter described with a touch of nostalgia reminiscent of Walton, as the realm of innocent pleasures and the carefree, open-air life of healthy enjoyments and diversions (much as Gay will do some years hence). Shadwell does not generalize, however, nor does he paint in black and white: neither town nor country are perfect. Other plays revolve around the very English tradition of spa holidays, with appropriate mythology and etiquette; or racing at Epsom, or manias like astrology. With this typology he comes close to realist drama and the nineteenth-century ‘sketch’. From his prologues and the texts of the plays, it is evident that Jonson is his true inspiration,4 though Shadwell’s formula is even more blatant and unsophisticated. His plays are mostly set in London, though we are not told exactly where. His crowded casts contain a plethora of traditional types – the fop (sometimes two or three of them together), the brothel keeper, the alluring girl or downright whore, the poetaster, the miles gloriosus – their traits and idiosyncrasies proclaimed in preview at the outset, suggesting that the play is paradigmatic rather than syntagmatic; in other words, the plot is summary and static. Shadwell brings the whole host of characters on stage for entire acts at a time, and sets them talking and chaffing among themselves, allowing them to indulge in either brief, bombastic, well-crafted speeches, or, preferably, colourful contumely and insult. Twists and surprises in the plot are not totally lacking, but in the worst of his dramas the characters are always the same from beginning to end. Shadwell shares with Dryden (who begrudged it) the record of the greatest number of adaptations in his period. He wrote remakes of just about everything, from Shakespeare to Jonson to Molière. The Libertine can claim to be the first of a series of plays on the Don Juan theme that was to engulf Europe after the end of the seventeenth century. 4

Epsom Wells (1672) recalls Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, and had a significant influence on novelists after Shadwell.

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2. The form given to The Sullen Lovers (1668) seems to threaten the very existence of the play, in that Stanford, a misanthropist, and, above all, a neurotic, finds himself plagued from the very beginning of the action by a swarm of ‘impertinents’ (the subtitle of the play), who wish to talk and jest with him; but he only wants to be alone, and gets rid of them. Stanford is forever on the brink of withdrawing from the world, but never actually does it. Symptoms interlock, and two cases of melancholy drift together: after each has sworn their enmity to Eros, Stanford and Emilia discover they love one another, thanks to two merry go-betweens. So after fifty years, Burton’s Anatomy was still producing offspring, as seen in these two characters from The Sullen Lovers. Other characters include several fops, and the usual pretentious poet, or playwright. Above them all towers the figure of Sir Positive, who proclaims himself an expert in everything, and comes a cropper, mainly because he lacks those most English of gifts – common sense and humour.5 The other characters set in motion secondary plots that weave in and out, with a certain degree of repetition, and seize every opportunity to exchange insults and abuse. The betrothal of the sullen lovers proceeds slowly, until the girl’s father appears accompanied by a suitor in the person of a country bumpkin. The True Widow (1679) has a quite insignificant plot, and a gallery of stereotyped characters, who talk and talk, and launch barbed attacks against this person or that. The everpresent poetaster recites his insipid verses, and engages in stylistic sallies with other dilettante wits. Everyone speaks at the same time, discoursing of their own particular passions, like horse- or dog-racing, or cock-fighting. The widow of the title pretends to be rich, and persuades various fools to lend her money with the promise of conspicuous rates of interest. She has two quick-thinking daughters to marry off, whose rival suitors soon almost come to blows. The truth comes out when it is discovered that the contracts have been made out using delible ink. The bailiff will only be silenced if he is allowed to marry the widow, which he does in a fake ceremony (the pretend wedding is a recurring feature of the plays of this period). The most theatrically effective scene is that in which the whole cast of characters sits 5

Satirical rallying of scientists, especially the ‘unpractical’ kind reportedly numerous in the Royal Society, is central to The Virtuoso (1676).

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down to watch a play within the play, and the two plots interweave and overlap: a duet of sweet-nothings between the two cooing lovers ends in adultery, but in the stalls and boxes a fight breaks out for the hand of the two sisters. One of the characters is a Puritan who rails against the widow’s trickery. The marriages are reparatory, but it cannot be said that justice is done. Shadwell’s characters are rarely completely positive. 3. The source of The Squire of Alsatia (1688) is Terence. The Alsatia of the title was a disreputable part of London, the haunt of pimps, prostitutes and tricksters. One of the strengths of Shadwell’s play is the use of authentic slang in the dialogues. What has almost never been pointed out is the play’s resemblance to Chapman’s All Fools (1605).6 A father entrusts one of his sons to a brother who lives in the town, while the other is raised in the country: the outcome of this ‘experiment’ goes against all expectations. Once again, the play is contained in the cast of characters: Cheatly was the explicit name of the widow in the previous play, and is given now to the villainous figure who leads foolish young men to ruin; a former captain plays the boaster, and Shadwell self-ironizes in the name of Shamwell. In the two brothers, the older debauched, the younger virtuous, Shadwell symbolizes the sound academic education and liberal curriculum of tradition – echoing Elyot’s The Governor7 – as against the narrow vision of country dwellers and the rigidity that leads to transgression and vice. Like Congreve after him, Shadwell is forced to be indulgent, and indicates as the benchmark of morality the permissive behaviour that was current at the end of the seventeenth century. The play might be called a ‘comedy of errors’, because the father of the two brothers believes, to the very end, that the morally upright son is degenerate, and vice versa. Unusually, Shadwell ends the play declaring the vice-ridden part of town now reformed and restored to righteousness: ‘Farewell forever all the vice of the age’. Bury Fair (1689) stands out among Shadwell’s plays because of its witty dialogues and satire against two affected Frenchified ladies; a background is provided by the comic ploy of a barber pretending to be a French count, an idea invented by Etherege. One of the two parallel plots traces the courtship of 6 7

Volume 1, § 112.2. Volume 1, § 40.3–4.

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the ‘count’ by the mincing Mrs Fantast, while the other is the verbal duel, unusually refined for Shadwell, between the ever-grumbling Wildish and Gertrude, who, after never having had a good word to say about love and lovers, end up by getting married. § 58. Shadwell II: ‘The Libertine’ As I mentioned above, The Libertine is generally acknowledged to be the first of the English versions of the Don Juan story, or at least the first noteworthy exemplar. One might think, mutatis mutandis, of a similar relationship between Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus with respect to all the other successive versions of the Faustian myth. Despite this, Shadwell’s play has received little attention, and no in-depth analysis, from historians of seventeenth-century drama. In fact, most of them ignore it altogether. From a cursory and incomplete survey, The Libertine comes across as a ‘grammatical’ and unimaginative adaptation, displaying its unwavering adherence to one particular version of the myth. Byron’s is an extreme example of a free adaptation, while Browning’s – Fifine at the Fair – hides its origin so cleverly that many dedicated source-hunters have failed to realize it is, indeed, another version of the old story. Pushkin’s Donna Anna illustrates a case of hendiadys, while Shadwell, with his array of female victims, and three replicas of Don John himself, constitutes a hyperbolic gemination. In his prologue, the author apologizes for the liberties he has taken with the original.8 His play is an interesting example of dialogue with a tradition, in which certain elements are included and other omitted. Also in the prologue, Shadwell makes it clear that the character of the libertine is taken from Italian sources and French adaptations, but asserts, unconvincingly,

8

Among the main sources are: a Don Juan by Rosimond, performed in Paris in 1669 (from which Shadwell took the idea of the three merry libertine mates, one of whom is Don Juan himself, the rape of a nun, and other material); Cicognini’s Don Giovanni; and Dorimont’s Le festin de pierre, ou le fils criminel. Shadwell’s play was performed in 1675 to rapturous applause. Purcell wrote music for a revival in 1692. The play was repeated many times up to the first years of the new century. By 1750, performances had tailed off considerably. In 1782 it was turned into a pantomime, with Delpini as arranger.

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that he has tried to renovate the story and avoid servile repetition of his sources. The murder committed by Don John, for example, is not connected to the rape; or, rather, his father was an obstacle to other rapes, not excluding incestuous ones. At the end of Act II his ghost appears, threatening his son with eternal punishment, only to be scornfully dismissed by him. Don John rids himself of Leonora by poisoning her. It is specified that Don John’s father is the governor of Seville; and the worst rape was committed against his aunt. After the seduction of the two daughters of Don Francisco before their wedding, circumstances impose once again the flight of the dissolutes from the scene. The two ‘pilgrims’ end up among the shepherds of Arcadia, then turn up full circle in the church. There to meet them is the statue of Don Pedro, the father. True to Shadwell’s tendency to reiterate, the dinner scene is twofold: the invitation is reciprocated as in Tirso de Molina, but the final part is extremely well orchestrated. There is no Donna Anna, but as Maria is enamoured of Ottavio, she may be seen as a replacement. Other women appear in the roles of the daughters of the magistrate who gives hospitality to Don John after his shipwreck. The purpose of Shadwell’s rifacimento is to show up vice in order to castigate it. The Don Juan dramas, says Shadwell, were performed in churches as an act of devotion and dissuasion. In the prologue the audience, and the critics, are invited to watch ‘the most irregular Play upon the Stage, / As wild, and as extravagant as th’Age’. From Molière, Shadwell took a hero that speculated on libertinism and atheism (Act I Scene 1). Don John is a giant of Donjuanism, and takes on, at the same time, Faustian overtones. He is not merely, or only, a sexual predator, but a slave of his sexual needs. Only a figure of hyperbolic wickedness could convey the moral lesson with any degree of success. 2. The Libertine is divided into the statutory five acts, and is mostly in prose, with occasional parts in verse which is unrhymed except for the couplets that close the various scenes. There are no formal scene divisions, while within the scenes themselves there are evident changes of location. From the very beginning, the idea of multiplication is forced home: the eponymous libertine is in reality a chief libertine backed up by two followers, who are only slightly less dissolute than their leader. The valet, Jacomo, completes the criminal quartet. Shadwell’s Don John is the most debauched and relentless in the whole Don Juan tradition. The famous aria of the

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catalogue becomes a list of unspeakable crimes, ‘thirty […] murders, rapes innumerable, frequent sacrilege, parricide’. Gemination is present also in Act II Scene 4, where no fewer than six wives appear to claim Don John as their husband, making him swear eternal fidelity. He does, and they believe him. The first dialogue in the play introduces many elements that characterize this particular version of the myth: the libertine trots out specious justifications laced with pseudo-Enlightenment philosophy: sin and conscience, future punishment and life hereafter are superstitions, ‘idle tales’ told by priests. The only ‘true guide’ is nature, and nature means natural urges, which, as they exist, must be satisfied. By means of this ‘philosophy’, Don John has dispersed the ‘fog’ that obscured the vision of his two companions. Reason is the ally of nature, and reason counsels man to follow nature’s commands. It is ‘the senses’ that ‘to the mind all objects convey’. This reasoning is specious and false because it ennobles man when he is most like an animal, a prey to promiscuous lust, and calls him an animal when he is monogamous. Jacomo is the traditional pusillanimous valet, whose main characteristic, here much underlined, is the fear of ending up on the gallows because of the misdeeds of his master. While Don John displays not the slightest sense of humour, and unbendingly dispenses his gelid pronouncements, Jacomo shows something of Molière’s, and, looking forward, Da Ponte’s, comic verve. He is reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Jachimo,9 and, at the same time, a surrogate of Molière’s believer, since he reminds Don John of the calls of his conscience, and begs him to heed them; in this context, Don John is the atheist (the ‘Atheisto Fulminato’) of the models. Yet when Leonora faints, Jacomo, too, is tempted (the flesh is weak) to resort to some ‘natural recipe’, and becomes a libertine in miniature. Many more horrors are shown, or, rather, recounted than in any of Shadwell’s models: we know from the preamble that Don John’s two fellow debauchees have

9

This is not the only Shakespearean ‘presence’: the storm in Act III mirrors the opening of The Tempest, complete with Jacomo’s amusing puns on the peril. At the same time, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, after being dispersed, all the characters look for each other, but to no avail. Furthermore, the first appearance of the father’s ghost turns the play into an intermittent parody of Hamlet. Romeo and Juliet is present, too, in the figure of the hermit.

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been guilty of incest and the murder of relatives. The first part of the story is told in the preamble: Don John has already committed the first murder, and now relives it. The curious thing is that he has killed, not the father of the woman or girl he lusts after, but his own father, who disapproved of his dissolute life, refused to sanction it by giving him money, and never left off lecturing him on his sins. In his famous essay on the Don Juan figure,10 Otto Rank makes no mention of this detail, which would have lent further support to his psychoanalytical interpretation. Don John has not only killed his father: he has also raped his aunt. 3. Leonora, who becomes Elvira in Mozart, keeps wondering how she can abhor his vices and yet still love him. Wildly hysterical, ‘operatic’, she abounds in canonical interjections directed at the seducer, like ‘barbarous’, ‘treacherous’, ‘inhuman’, and ‘cruel’. Jacomo pities her, and when she faints, attempts to rape her. Don John turns his attention to Maria, who is the Donna Anna of the models. She is waiting for her beloved, Don Ottavio, and is serenaded by Don John, who subsequently disguises himself as Don Ottavio. The representatives of the law look for the wrongdoers, but are scattered. Don John is discovered in Maria’s bedroom; her cries bring her brother onto the scene, and he is killed by Don John. Maria and her maid, Flora, dressed in male attire, set about to avenge Ottavio and her honour. The opening event of the source plays is therefore separated and doubled in two temporal sequences: on one side the murder of his father; on the other, Donna Anna ‘forced’, and Don Ottavio who leaps to avenge her but is killed before he can do so. In this scene Maria’s guards are forced to flee, Flora is killed by the three debauchees, and Maria is disarmed. Act III Scene 6 presents the first, sudden appearance of the father’s ghost, who enjoins his son to repent, but vanishes amid mocking laughter from him and his three henchmen, absolutely unmoved by the vision. Shadwell’s most obvious variation is the reintroduction of the shipwreck, following which the four castaways are rescued by an anchorite, and then by Don Francisco, of whom the first thing they ask is women. Don Francisco is, understandably, scandalized. The following day will see the weddings of his two daughters,

10

Die Don Juan Gestalt, Wien 1924.

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and he invites the survivors of the shipwreck to the ceremony. As in Mozart, the two women who have been raped or abandoned, join forces: one wishes to regain the man who has rejected her, the other to wreak vengeance on the man who has raped her. They are working at cross-purposes, therefore. With a move that we might call ‘Byronic’ ante litteram, Flavia and Clara, Don Francisco’s daughters, discuss the imminent ceremonies that will see them united with men they have never seen before, and express their envy of English women, who have greater freedom and independence. They have caught a glimpse of Don John, and desire him. Don John seduces Clara, and nearly does the same to Flavia. In the models, Là ci darem la mano was sung together with the fishwife or peasant girl. Leonora’s poisoning by Don John shows the ease with which Shadwell eliminates characters one after the other in the course of the action, only to bring them all together again as ghosts at the end of the play. 4. In the meantime, Maria appeals to Don Francisco, a magistrate, asking that the three dissolute knights be punished for their misdeeds. The magistrate, however, is unwilling to incriminate them, and limits himself to ejecting them from his house. In a scene of great comedy, each of the daughters claims to be betrothed to Don Juan. Maria and Don Francisco are killed, predictably, and Flavia and Clara decide to become nuns. While nymphs and shepherds sing the praises of pure love, the three debauchees turn up, believing they have found a safe refuge. Jacomo once again attempts a sexual rapprochement but is threatened with castration. At the centre of the church stands the equestrian statue of Don Pedro, who has been invited to dine by Jacomo. When Don John derides him in the dining room, the ghost tells him to repent, and threatens him with eternal damnation. Don John is untroubled, and proceeds to satisfy his lust on a nun. The other nuns, among whom are Clara and Flavia, resist the flattery and cajoling of the libertine. On the stroke of midnight, the four debauchees set out for the church and the statue, surrounded by the ghosts of all those who have been killed in the course of the play, lined up along the walls bearing torches in their hands. When the devils begin their chant announcing the vicinity of hell, the two followers are swallowed up, but Don John, fearless, continues to defy his father: ‘here I stand firm, and all thy threats contemn’. In a cloud of fire, he descends into hell, untouched by ‘the least remorse’.

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§ 59. Vanbrugh* John Vanbrugh (1664–1726), while not exactly a Leonardo da Vinci, was a gifted polymath who distinguished himself, not in different literary genres, but in two fields, not in themselves related: the theatre and architecture. His competence in both these walks of life make him one of the most significant artists of his day. Among his architectural achievements may be mentioned Castle Howard, the Haymarket Theatre, and Blenheim Palace, buildings of such stunning design that they place Vanbrugh among the three English architects who came closest to the concept of continental tridimensionality.1 Because of the duties incumbent upon him as an architect, and the highly remunerated commissions he was awarded, Vanbrugh remained a part time playwright, as proved by the fact that he was never contracted to any theatre company, and in forty years of writing life, put together a total of twelve plays, many of which adaptations, though not exact copies of originals; and that he wrote only two completely new plays, and left one unfinished at his death. What we have by this dilettante is of good, sometimes excellent, quality, and shows great, unfulfilled promise. Vanbrugh’s stature is not always acknowledged, and appreciation of his gifts is far from universal, but it seems to me that no one before him has produced such striking comic, and grotesque, characters, such as his sharpwitted servants who rarely fail, with their idiosyncratic speech; his country folk, too, are irresistible, fresh in town and dying to pick up city manners; or the exasperated husbands, and the flirtatious wives with a weakness for the card table; or the sly younger son who pulls a fast one on his older *

Complete Works, ed. B. Dobrée and J. Webb, 4 vols, London 1927; selection of main plays, ed. A. E. H. Swaen, London 1896 (four), ed. B. Hammond, Oxford 2004 (five). G. M. Berkowitz, Sir John Vanbrugh and the End of Restoration Comedy, Amsterdam 1981; M. Bingham, Masks and Façades: Sir John Vanbrugh, The Man and His Settings, London 1984; K. Downes, Sir John Vanbrugh: A Biography, London 1987; J. Bull, Vanbrugh and Farquhar, Basingstoke 1998.

1

Cf. M. Praz, ‘Barocco inglese’, in SSI, vol. II, 84–8, in which the critic attempts to demonstrate the scant correspondence between Vanbrugh the architect (who found inspiration in the palaces of the Rome of the Popes, and later, Palladianism) and Vanbrugh the playwright, who can be associated with no particular literary style.

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brother, and is rewarded according to the saying omnia munda mundis. A scourge of the foibles and fixations of the wealthy middle class, aped by the small landed gentry, Vanbrugh looks forward to the great novelists of the future, Fielding, Smollett, and Dickens. He knew Congreve, and collaborated with him in running the Italian theatre of the Haymarket; but the two are completely different as playwrights, for the simple reason that Congreve’s airy, evanescent plots and style are often the very things satirized by Vanbrugh. His favourite subject is the marriage crisis: every plot revolves round a married couple and their quarrels. In one play, a serving girl is asked how her master and mistress are getting on, and she answers: ‘Live! Why – like man and wife, generally out of humour, “quarrel often, seldom agree”, complain of one another; and perhaps, have both reason. In short, ’tis much as ’tis at your house’. Vanbrugh’s dramatic aesthetic consisted simply in amusing the wealthy bourgeois, ‘despite their wives and taxes’. His reply to Collier’s Short View was to assert the importance of the theatre as a mirror of the manners of the day. His therapy, however, is not all that different to Congreve’s: any reformation of manners must come about rebus sic stantibus, in other words, in total respect of what Congreve called ‘the way of the world’. Consequently, it is difficult not to think that the alternative to the chaotic world of the end of the seventeenth century – represented by the inevitable couples of whiter than white lovers – is a hurried remedy, a formal endorsement of the moralizing campaign announced and promoted by William of Orange, which was responsible for the rise of plays based on the figure of the reformed rake. 2. From Flemish stock based in Ghent, Vanbrugh’s father owned a sugar refinery. He sent his son, the future playwright, to study in France, where he was arrested for spying in 1691 and imprisoned in the Bastille. There he was treated as befitted a nobleman, and therefore had the leisure to think of and write, at least in part, not the first but what would be the second of his plays. For a short time he was a soldier, and on leaving the army dedicated to the theatre eight years packed with adaptations and original plays, of which The Relapse (1696) was his debut. Taking his cue from one of Cibber’s plays, Vanbrugh ‘deformed’ the reformed libertine, overturning the original premise. In turn the same plot was to be used in a moralized version a century later by Sheridan. In Cibber, the reformed libertine

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is reunited with his wife, whose attractions he rediscovers; Vanbrugh’s Loveless2 puts his determination to the test, and, too sure of himself, falls back into the fault of infidelity. His wife, Amanda, might, it seems, go down the same road. The London cosmos is modelled on that of Jonson or Middleton: nothing is done for nothing; everything has a price. Gone are pure, unsullied feelings, replaced by generalized material greed. The positive hero of the comedy remains, despite himself, Young Fashion, who, disinherited and penniless, steals from his older brother, Sir Novelty Fashion (he has just bought himself the title of Lord Foppington), the daughter of a wealthy country gentleman. The two plots are connected by the pretext that Foppington courts, unsuccessfully, Amanda, as well as his ‘official’ betrothed. The architect in Vanbrugh is able to alternate the plots, managing them with millimetric precision and bringing them together in the epilogue. The main plot soon becomes insipid, while the secondary one gains in vivacity. Young Fashion has a valet who comes out with the most outrageous but funny lines, and his master is just as witty. Foppington has been rightly described as the last and greatest in a line of fops originating in Etherege’s Flutter. Vanbrugh gives him a relatively new linguistic tick: he mispronounces his words, replacing the letter ‘a’ with ‘o’. In the story of the two brothers, one of the most agile and amusing plots ever written, a pimp talks Young Fashion into beating Foppington to it and marrying the fiery Miss Hoyden. So the play, in the manner of Etherege and Wycherley, becomes a comedy about the town as opposed to the country, two antithetical worlds and cultures, a subject loved by audiences. Young is good at heart, and twice asks his brother for money; the refusal by his miserly, brutal, insensitive sibling authorizes him, in his mind, to set a trap for him. The priest, too, who celebrates the secret wedding, thinks only of eating and making money. The betrothed bride consents to the wedding though she is not aware exactly who she is marrying. So, honestly but cunningly,

2

‘Etymological’ names for characters are common from Etherege onwards. Vanbrugh always chooses his with great care. Foppington obviously embodies ‘fop’, and his first name, Young Fashion, underlines the message. See also Coupler, a pimp, Serringe, a doctor, Friendly, and Clumsey.

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Young manages to solve this and other problems, and Foppington can only grin and bear it. 3. The Provoked Wife (1697), which some prefer to The Relapse and consider Vanbrugh’s masterpiece, is, in reality, inferior to the first play, except in those parts that feature the splendid Sir John Brute. These episodes are, however, too far apart, and the intervening spaces filled with uninteresting, slow-moving scenes dominated by caricatures in part déjà vu or sketchily drawn (Lady Fanciful, a female fop, is not in herself exciting, and her presence in the plot is somewhat forced). With all that, it remains a play full of startling effects and, at times, scintillating dialogues, but without staying power and continuity. Yet the bickering of the Brutes, almost a stichomythia, with wealth of insults given and received, is epochal. Sir Brute, the embittered husband, who opens the play with the words: ‘What cloying meat is love – when matrimony’s the sauce to it’, inaugurates a second archetype, which, perhaps springing from Jonson, can be traced down through the years to Thackeray’s Pitt Crawley. His grotesque behaviour when he gives vent to his ill-humour reminds one of the greatest adversary of the bond of wedlock after Vanbrugh – Thomas Hardy. In the subplot, slight compensation is offered by Heartfree and Belinda, after Constant has walked the tightrope between Platonic and sexual love in his courtship of Lady Brute. Vanbrugh continues his probing of the manners of the day in denouncing mutual marital connivance: wives know that their husbands are unfaithful, and vice versa, and ‘virtue’ is really only ‘discretion’, adultery under wraps. At the beginning of the play, Lady Brute appears patient and obliging towards her grumpy husband, but she, too, is dissatisfied and looks around for opportunities. She asks herself whether a wife would not do well to betray a husband like hers. Every time Brute appears on the scene, he utters lapidary statements oozing poison on the wretched life of any man who is married to a woman he does not love. Scenes 2 and 3 of Act III were censored for offending religious feeling, and Vanbrugh was forced to re-write them. In the original version – in which we are presented with the raw pathology, the deep-rooted schizophrenia, far from comic, caused by the tyranny of matrimony – Brute finds himself in the company of a crowd of blaspheming drunks; he dresses up as a priest, insults the guards, is hauled up before the magistrate, and released after some admonishment.

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In the ‘revised’ version, Brute dresses up as a woman, and impersonates Lady Brute. This episode, rendered apparently inoffensive,3 was the tour de force of the great actor, Garrick. The scenes in the park where Lady Brute and Belinda cover their faces with their masks, as in Etherege and Congreve, and the two ladies, in a heady mix of earnestness, fun, and sexual curiosity, meet their suitors, lie between the surreal and the absurd, and echo the japes and jokes of Antonio and Nacky in Otway’s Venetian tragedy. A dirty and dishevelled Brute returns home and finds in a closet the two gallants. He falls asleep, lulled by the knowledge that he has put his wife to shame. In order to ward off the consequences, the intuitive Belinda announces that she will marry Heartfree, whom she does not dislike. The next day, Brute is forced to accept the situation. With a great sense of theatre, Vanbrugh has the shrewd servant come on stage to throw light on all the plots, and show what a lot of fuss has been created over nothing. Brute perks up: ‘So that, after all,’ ‘’tis a moot point, whether I am a cuckold or not’. 4. In The Confederacy (1705), derived from a French source, we find another down-and-out called Dick, who, in false guise, skilfully courts a wealthy lady (the candid Corinna, who is aptly named a ‘plain-dealer’),4 against the background of a matrimonial crisis accepted by everyone as normal. The two rather foolish husbands, who attempt to seduce each other’s wife, are ably countered by the perspicuous Flippanta. The union of the young couple, uncertain to the very end, is approved and celebrated, thus providing the usual anchor against the moral drift. Vanbrugh wrote only four acts of A Journey to London; Cibber found them among his papers, and wrote the fifth and final act, calling the finished play The Provoked Husband (1728). As ever, intermittently, Vanbrugh has written a short but delightful satirical masterpiece, exploiting verbal and dialect caricature.5 Here the attack is aimed at wives: the three men have a clean enough record, though they are no paragons of intelligence. At their sides are three 3 4 5

Brute gives a satirical summary of the typical day of an idle lady, with many realistic details. § 55.6. And maybe the last, or penultimate, time that the pseudo-Italian exclamation ‘Cotso’ was heard on the English stage.

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wives, almost all quick-thinking and lecherous. Uncle Richard is the voice off that comments on the foolishness of his relatives from the country, because his nephew Sir Headpiece has bought a seat in Parliament, and is taking his wife and children to London. They cannot wait to take full advantage of every opportunity to enjoy themselves, enjoyment for them meaning permissiveness leading to the bottomless pit of vice, gaming, and, therefore, debts. The arrival of the family in London is described with an almost Dickensian flair, the coach pulling in to its destination chock-full of provisions. The play ends with a series of misunderstandings and blunders that throw a pitiless light on the stupidity of the Headpiece family. If the paterfamilias is a poor fool, the children are greedy, obese and malicious, and, had the play gone on for much longer, the wife would have flirted with someone, or even committed adultery, influenced by Lady Arabella, who, together with her husband, represents the classic dysfunctional couple in Vanbrugh. Lady Arabella, a ‘country wife’, exemplifies the way in which the town quickly ‘denaturalizes’ the country. § 60. Farquhar George Farquhar (1678–1707) is the first major true-blooded Irishman in the history of English literature, and was, obviously, a Protestant. His theatrical vocation in all likelihood is to be attributed to the fact that Dublin saw the foundation, in 1660, of the first theatre outside London, the so-called Smock Street,1 which was to cater for the cultural needs of the English landowners and administrative officials living ‘within the Pale’. Without that theatre, Farquhar the playwright would not have existed either. Born in Londonderry, the son of an impoverished vicar, he studied at Trinity, like Congreve some short time before him, but only for one or two years, before being expelled, or in any case, before taking his degree. He soon discovered he was not cut out for the religious life to which he had been destined: his true vocation was for the theatre. Like others before him, he began acting while young – about twenty years of age – but without great results. Having accidentally wounded a fellow actor, he was forced to 1

DEA begins his fifth chapter with Farquhar, the earliest of the Irish writers examined in that volume.

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emigrate to England, where he joined the army, first as a recruiting officer, then as a lieutenant in an Irish regiment. He failed to reach the theatre of war of the Spanish Succession. In the meantime, he had started writing for the stage, and not only in order to support his family. He had fallen into the net of a widow with children, and, believing her to be a wealthy heiress, had married her. It is rather like the plot of one of his plays. Like Lee and Otway, he died young, a victim to consumption before he was thirty. His ethnic origin is betrayed by the fact that in all of his plays there is at least one Irish character. There is, however, no trace of a political consciousness, however hard the students of Irish literature might look. Farquhar is not a political writer, but, all the same, Brecht read into The Recruiting Officer a satire against militarism, which he adapted in his Pauken und Trompeten.2 The truth is, the Irish are inserted in his plays to raise a laugh: they all possess the typical Irish trait of the ‘blarney’, or eloquence: they use the dialect of Irish English, get words wrong, are always hungry and thirsty, and are far from honest. One of his characters represents a ‘French’ chaplain who is suspected of plotting in favour of the Papists. 2. Farquhar wrote eight comedies, of which only two, the last works of his canon, are essential reading, far superior as they are to the others, and bearing the mark of Molière.3 Farquhar is a great entertainer whose realm is the superficial. In his Discourse on Comedy he states his brutally practical and uncomplicated aesthetics, which dispenses with the unities of Aristotle and Dryden, and elects the audience sole judge of the value and worth of a play. The audience rewarded him: his plays broke all records for numbers of performances, and for a considerable time – the first fifteen years of the new century – Farquhar stands out as the most popular and best loved playwright in English. His plots are not particularly good, nor ingeniously constructed; but they are full of things that happen, with lots of misunderstandings,

2 Brecht’s Puntila und Matti contains echoes of Sir Harry Wildair (1701), in which the hero of the title is a libertine when drunk, and a moralist when sober again (SES, 270). 3 Recent complete works: The Works of George Farquhar, ed. S. S. Kenny, 2 vols, Oxford 1988. The Mermaid edition of four comedies, ed. W. Archer, London 1906, contains an excellent introduction.

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women dressed up as men, and so on. The greatest attraction of his characters, it must be said, lies in ‘the gift of the gab’, the ability to speak flowingly, wittily and spontaneously. Their salacious humour and colourful expressions put them in a different league to the complicated, rarefied witticisms that fill the pages of Congreve and the mouths of his characters. Farquhar, too, however, aims at presenting the society of his time in microcosm. Some stereotypes still persisted, tottering on the stage on their last legs, so to speak, even if by now outdated and irrelevant, like the awful fop. Society could still be divided into blades and gulls, fools and fiddlers, the defrauded and the fraudsters, many of the latter dowry hunters who passed themselves off as noblemen fallen on hard times. Seen through Farquhar’s deforming lens, sex was a safety valve for the release of social and cultural tension. His plays are full of easy sexual conquests beckoning lovers and libertines, whose victims are guileless, disoriented country girls. Consequently, the plays are also full of illegitimate children who are usually entrusted to the care of the parish. The prevailing atmosphere can be gauged by the systematic use of sexual double-entendres in all conversations, as in Shakespeare or Middleton. The rules imposed on sexual behaviour in matrimony provokes, in Farquhar as in Vanbrugh, widespread marital crises. Farquhar’s last play is an exception, as it proposes a utopian future with a new divorce law, and equal rights for both partners in the marriage contract. In short, Farquhar savages the double standard that was, however, to be the norm well into the nineteenth century. His last two plays owed their success, in part, to the new ‘decentralized’ setting and the truly innovative choice of two occasions and two dramatic situations never before presented on stage – Shrewsbury and recruiting officers, Lichfield with the toing and froing between the inn and the squire’s house – simply because no playwright before Farquhar had been an army officer. Of course, in the end Farquhar conforms to the expectations of the time, and gives free rein to libertines, gulls and impostors, winding up the action with sudden and unexplained changes of heart. There are two main female types: one is the anxious, suffering lady who broods on the probable falsehoods of the man she loves, and finds some release for her unhappiness in turning away the various suitors she cannot but attract. Obviously, this is not a comic character, but a deeply serious one. The other type of female is the young, enterprising woman who attempts to redeem the libertine who is assailing her virtue. These ardent members of the gentle sex, who are not

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averse to wearing disguise if necessary, are the distant ancestors of Jane Eyre, because they sense that their various Rochesters can be saved, whatever their crimes, whatever the number of their sexual misdemeanours. On the strength of these female characters, Farquhar has been often considered the forerunner of eighteenth-century sentimental comedy. 3. Farquhar’s first play, performed at Drury Lane in 1698, revolves around an Irish libertine who is induced to change his ways by a female character. The fop, Wildair, is central to two comedies: the first is The Constant Couple (1699), where the author’s dramatic skills are still not fully developed. In itself, the plot is static, and is based on four suitors for the hand of Mrs Lurewell, Farquhar’s first passionate gentlewoman. She exerts complete control over the vying lovers, and sets one against the other, sometimes summoning them to come to her in embarrassing situations, from which she extricates herself by having them hide in a closet, or dressing them up. The rival suitors do all they can to trip one another up, but Lurewell is intelligent enough to see that the most worthy candidate for her favours is the serious, respected colonel. That Lurewell is already a romantic character can be seen clearly in the recital of her seduction, when she was fifteen, by an unnamed student. Since then, she has sworn never to marry. At the same time, Wildair clumsily attempts to seduce a coy prostitute, aptly called Angelica, who admonishes him on his morals with easy-flowing rhetoric. It is not only the respectable marriages that dispel the shades of squalor: in a final scene of recognition, the colonel is discovered to be the very student that had seduced the young Lurewell. With this reunion, her trauma is healed. In The Twin-Rivals (1702) there is a hint of tragedy, or tragicomedy; the hunchback, Wouldbe, is reminiscent of the stepbrothers in Shakespeare’s King Lear, as, with his underhand manoeuvres, he aims to eliminate his elder brother and steal his inheritance. Wouldbe is aided by a cunning midwife who likes a drink, and is a mixture of gushing sincerity and scoundrelry. Richmore, his parallel figure, is a great seducer of women, whom he then abandons, but not without finding willing husbands for them to hide their shame. Wouldbe’s master plan appears to be a copy of Young Fashion’s ruse to get the better of Foppington in Vanbrugh:4 in fact, 4

§ 59.2.

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as soon as he has secured the inheritance for himself, as well as the title of Lord, he is portrayed in the classic scene of the levee. By means of, or in spite of, a series of exhilarating adventures, justice is done, and Richmond the libertine is obliged to marry the woman he has deceived so often. 4. Both Farquhar’s masterpieces have great documental interest. The Recruiting Officer (1706) owes much to his brief career as such an officer in Shrewsbury. The two recruiters in the comedy, Plume and Kite, are philanderers with illegitimate children all over England. The name of their role, therefore, implies the ‘enrolment’ of women, who are then left everywhere pregnant with bastards. Yet Plume does love, in a non-mercenary way, the object of his affections being Sylvia, whose father, a judge, hides his lasciviousness beneath his wig and gown, and refuses his consent to their union because Plume is not wealthy enough. With Sylvia exiled by her father, Plume takes advantage of a poultrymaid, Rose, enticing her to a cottage, like Don Giovanni with Zerlina, and ‘pressing’ her (an obvious euphemism for rape). Rose leaves the cottage with dreams of the future but without her maidenhead. When Sylvia re-appears dressed as a soldier, and therefore, recruiting material, Plume fights a fellow officer for the right to sign her up. The surrealistic duel is like something out of Ariosto, and turns the contenders into the best of friends. Before the recognition, which is delayed in order to exploit the comic potential of the fact that the ladies see Sylvia as a handsome and desirable man, the play loses a bit of its verve: too much space is dedicated to Sergeant Kite, disguised as a fortune-teller, conning the countryfolk in a scene reminiscent of Jonson’s The Alchemist (and also the recruiting scene in 2 Henry IV). Plume is probably lying when he denies having laid a finger on Rose, and agrees to ‘unrecruit’ Sylvia, who is, after all, a woman. In The Beaux’ Stratagem5 the penniless Aimwell and Archer go from town to town trying to lay their hands on a rich heiress. They end up in an inn in Lichfield, where they pretend to be master and servant: the plan is to share the proceeds once their mission has been accomplished. The other, symmetrical, couple consists of the two 5

Written by Farquhar in 1707, by now reduced to poverty, in a garret, and in six weeks, commissioned by his close friend, the actor, Robert Wilkes or Wilks, who gave him twenty guineas to help him out.

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sisters-in-law, Dorinda and Mrs Sullen. The latter (see Shadwell’s The Sullen Lovers) is aptly named, as she is afflicted by bitter marital unhappiness, just like Vanbrugh’s Brutes. Diagnostically, splenetic husbands are a thing of the country, not the town.6 The link between the two plots appears clear when the two ladies see a stranger in church, the stranger being none other than Aimwell. They invite the ‘servant’, Archer, to their home. Two courtships commence and are carried on in parallel. Archer sweet-talks Sullen and is granted access to her bedroom, where a self-styled French priest is hiding out (an attempt by Farquhar to rekindle the now distant psychosis of the Popish Plot). Mrs Sullen gives voice to the average moral stance of the time: ‘I can’t swear I could resist the temptation; though I can safely promise to avoid it; and that’s as much as the best of us can do.’ The night scene of the seduction by Archer is a masterpiece within a masterpiece – high-flying rhetoric punctuated by sobs and sighs, false denials, hilarious faux pas, red herrings, ill-timed comments – all in a mounting spiral of confusion caused by an ongoing burglary. When everything appears to be coming to the foreseen conclusion, to wit, the actual act of adultery, Farquhar produces his deus ex machina, in the form of Sullen’s brother, who provides the play with the utopian ending mentioned above: the Sullens separate, Mrs Sullens gets back her dowry, and will marry Archer after her divorce. Aimwell, on his part, will lead Dorinda to the altar. § 61. Rochester The notorious John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester (1647–1680), the epitome of the English libertine, was the son of a general who had materially helped the future Charles II to escape to France. His mother was, instead, a fervent Puritan. He was eleven when his father died, leaving him the title. After his university studies, he was granted a pension by the king. For three years he travelled widely in France and Italy, and visited, among other places, Venice and Padua. On his return to England, he became valetde-chambre and personal assistant to Charles II. His marriage to an heiress met with resistance from her family. In the meantime, Rochester, not yet 6

Ever the chameleon, Farquhar ‘borrows’ from Milton’s Areopagitica several propositions proving the legitimacy of divorce.

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twenty years of age, distinguished himself as a volunteer in the naval war against the Dutch in 1665–1666. He and his betrothed eloped, and were married in secret. After 1667 Rochester divided his time between his home in Oxfordshire (his wife had borne him four children) and the court. He died at the age of thirty-three, like Carew, probably of syphilis, with renal complications. His surprise deathbed repentance has been put in doubt, given that the only witness to the event was a court chaplain, Gilbert Burnet, later Bishop of Salisbury, with whom Rochester, by now desperately ill, had conversed at length on spiritual matters. If the last-minute change of heart did indeed take place, it means that Rochester chose not to end up like Don Juan, although he himself was the inspiration for many playwrights of the day, such as Etherege and his friend Shadwell, when they came to write their contributions to the Don Juan myth that was then sweeping Europe. Rochester was held to be the leader of a ‘merry gang’ of court wits, including Sedley,1 Etherege, Wycherley and others, that have been compared by some critics with the ‘bright young things’ of Waugh and Huxley.2 In the late seventeenth-century literary context, Rochester’s activity is fragmentary: he wrote occasional scenes for other playwrights, and a rather slavish adaptation of Fletcher’s Valentinian; he was also a theatrical producer, the patron of several dramatists, and an instructor of actors and actresses. 1

2

Sir Charles Sedley (1639–1701), when still a young man, was a bright court wit, but not immoral like Rochester. For the consolation of the English, when quite elderly, he served as a member of Parliament for thirty years during the reign of William and Mary. Flattered by Dryden in his dialogue on dramatic poetry, he was the author of at least two competent plays, The Mulberry Garden, in a mixture of prose and rhymed couplets, and Bellamira (1687), based on the Eunuch by Terence (also borrowed by Wycherley, see § 55.4). He was also an insignificant writer of tragedies, a polite essayist, a fine translator from Latin, and, above all, a pleasing, graceful writer of songs in the Cavalier style – exaltations of fidelity addressed to a Celia or a Chloris, by libertines to whom fidelity meant absolutely nothing. Charles Sackville (1638–1706), grandson of the Thomas Sackville who wrote the Induction (Volume 1, § 44.2), later Lord Buckhurst and Earl of Dorset, enjoyed enormous and undeserved fame thanks to Dryden’s praise of him. A biting satirist rather a love poet, he also wrote a dramatic account of a naval battle, ‘Written at Sea’. See PGU, vol. VI, 143, and D. M. Vieth, ‘Introduction’, in The Works of the Earl of Rochester, Ware 1995, xxxiv.

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Though at first a friend of Dryden’s, he later became one of his fiercest enemies.3 As I mentioned in my section on Dryden, he is said to have been behind the ambush that left him wounded, motivated by a satire that may not even have been by him at all. Rochester, however, is remembered for a handful of erotic, if not downright pornographic, poems not intended for publication, which were widely circulated in manuscript among friends and acquaintances. They were collected and published for the first time in a, possibly, posthumous edition in Antwerp in 1680. Throughout the eighteenth century his reputation as king of English libertines thrived, and more than fifty editions of his poems were published.4 After the turn of the century, however, and for the whole of the long Victorian period, Rochester became closet reading, and was only brought back into the drawing rooms and libraries at the beginning of the twentieth century. Before dying, he left instructions that his poems were to be destroyed, so it is impossible to know with any accuracy how many poems he wrote in his short lifetime, nor assign a date to any of the extant ones.5 2. Rochester’s personality was naturally aggressive, and sooner or later he quarrelled with his pupils or anyone in his care. Even the king was not exempt, and Rochester was often out of favour because of criticism levelled at the sovereign. If someone angered him, he would be challenged to a duel. Libertinism in him was elevated to the realm of metaphysics in the wake of Hobbes, the éminence grise who introduced him to sceptical materialism and the distrust of reason. Rochester and the other court rakes in his entourage put into practice the Hobbesian axiom that the purpose of life is the satisfaction of the senses, as demanded by the urgings of nature. Morality and religious inhibition were to be rejected. In the long run Rochester

3 4 5

‘An Allusion to Horace’, in rhymed couplets, consists of barbed attacks on the principal writers of the day, especially Dryden, all subjected to his mordacious wit. According to Vieth 1995, xxxiii, on the authority of a contemporary source. There are three classic editions, ed. D. M. Vieth, New Haven, CT and London 1968, and Ware 1995, mentioned above; ed. K. Walker, Oxford 1984; ed. H. Love, Oxford 1999, with, in the middle, the one ed. F. H. Ellis, Harmondsworth 1994. For the controversy over the authenticity of Rochester’s three most famous poems, cf. the review of a later edition, in TLS (3 September 2010, 7–8).

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regrets the villainies he celebrates; or it may be he deems them the necessary condition for a renunciation, or what he calls a ‘regeneration’, always put off because of relentless psychic determinism. He was a double-sided libertine who acted like a normal, staid family man when at his home in Oxfordshire, but when he went to London ‘the devil entered into him’.6 He was also a dipsomaniac who, under the influence of alcohol, was capable of deplorable faux pas and actions, and would come out with the most embarrassing opinions. Whether he was telling the truth or exaggerating, Bishop Burnet recalled hearing Rochester confess that for five whole years he had never once been sober. It is symptomatic that he should have had a mania for disguise. Once again, Burnet is the source of the story of Rochester dressing up as a porter, or chairman, or beggar, or other ‘strange figures’, like the quack, Alexander Bendo. One thinks of Browning’s many masks into which his personality was split. Rochester’s best poems show an inner struggle, at times a denunciation and renunciation of the life of pleasure he had thrown himself into. He sounds like certain great writers of today who are addicted to some form of drug and cannot break their dependence however hard they try. Significantly, in many poems, Rochester uses the word ‘slave’ to refer to himself, together with a host of synonyms. Women are seen as the ruin of men, so the libertine is at heart a misogynist, and his desire can never be satisfied because the possessed female requires more and more orgasms, and the libertine just ‘cannot swive’.7 3. Critical assessment of Rochester’s poetry has always been protean and controversial: for some he is a born poet with his own unmistakable style, second only to Dryden in contemporary terms; for others he is a mediocre amateur, an expression of the manners of the day, very little of whose verse is worth saving. The scandalized Victorians separated the inoffensive, neutral, poems from the pornographic ones, but they made the mistake of basing their judgement on moral reprobation.8 It must 6 7 8

John Aubrey’s words, quoted by Vieth 1995, xxvi. The verb, meaning to copulate, is one of the many slang terms used by Rochester, together with ‘frig’ (‘to masturbate’) and ‘tarse’ (the male member). Taine in particular gave a completely distorted idea of Rochester’s spiritual dimension (TAI, vol. II, 337–40).

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be admitted that Rochester makes great use in his poems of ‘four-letter words’, but they become part of a cold, controlled linguistic game – dry, epigrammatic, anti-Baroque, and Metaphysical. They do not, as in D. H. Lawrence, vibrate with the transcendent intensity of the erotic. Rochester is the other side of Restoration theatre: playwrights were forced to speak through allusion and metaphor, whereas the manuscript poet cared nothing about censorship and could be as outspoken as he wished. Both, however, provide a linguistic, auditory record of manners in the year of grace, 1680, and the following twenty or so years, up to 1698 and the arrival on the scene of Collier. Far from wanting to arouse his readers, Rochester wants them to feel disgust and nausea for the act of copulation. Any time-line of Rochester’s poetry is bound to be open to debate. The editor, Vieth, gave it a romantic, teleological slant by dividing the corpus into four phases: apprenticeship; early maturity; tragic maturity; disillusion and death. Rochester’s first poems read like leftovers from an outdated anthology, in which the women are given names like Olinda, Celia, Chloris and so on, and are possibly transfigurations and doubles of his future wife. Yet there are some very strong poems: ‘A Wish’ seems the bitter epitaph of an aged poet rather than the extraordinary experiment of a fifteen-year-old. It expresses the desire to convert heart and soul into sperm in order to conceive himself, then grow his soul for nine months in his own womb, after which the soul, by means of a second ejaculation, will leave the body, thus satisfying a primeval wish for ‘regeneration’. In the wide range of genres and moods of the poems, the pastoral is present in parodic form. From time to time, Rochester dons his mask and imitates the high-pitched voice of a ‘Platonic lady’, who spurns intercourse and makes do with erotic foreplay. The ‘Walk in St James’s Park’ begins with an unusually relaxed description of the kind of sexual activities that go on there, as seen in the plays of the time. It ends with an invective against ‘loose Corinna’, who prefers vacuous fops, and whose ‘devouring cunt’ is never satiated. ‘Signor Dildo’ is an obscene pronouncement on the female thirst for promiscuous sex. The colloquial openings are deliberately limping, but they rhyme, as in the ballad that recounts the wonders of Tunbridge Wells and other spas, where fops flourish and strut like peacocks down the streets. Towards the mid-1670s, Rochester, by now tired, sick and sarcastic, tried his hand at

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different forms and styles, like the dramatic dialogue, the mask, or a new kind of melancholy song. In his most famous poem, ‘A Satyr against Reason and Mankind’, he paints a shattered cosmos, a déluge which is also the alibi for the poet’s moral collapse when he asks himself what is the point of being virtuous and upright if it makes us no wiser, no nobler and no more hopeful. The construction of the poem is dialectical: a voice speaks out in support of reason, but justified reason does not lead to the renunciation of pleasure but to its enjoyment. Animals kill for necessity, men for self-interest, sometimes disloyally. In ‘Considerate, Considerandus’, Rochester affirms that stepmother nature gives little to mankind in the way of real, solid, lasting pleasure; man strives but does not thrive for long. The ‘Maimed Debauchee’ is forced by his various ailments to withdraw into indolence, but is compensated by remembering the pleasures he enjoyed while young, and the wild things he has done. Now, in his impotence, he spurs his acolytes on to vice. A different Rochester is behind the delightful verses of a town Artemisia to a country Chloe, a series of pictures of a life of pleasure expressed in breathlessly rapturous falsetto. § 62. Samuel Butler* Hudibras by Samuel Butler1 (1613–1680) is a work of enormous experimental value, extraordinary innovation, and considerable stylistic prowess. It also displays such metrical inventiveness, such rhyming skill, and such an extensive and revolutionary poetic vocabulary (unseen since John Donne), that is hard to understand why it has become one of the least read, but *

Poetical Works, introduced and annotated by G. Gilfillan, 2 vols, Edinburgh 1854; Works, ed. A. R. Waller and R. Lamar, 3 vols, Cambridge 1905–1928. Hudibras, ed. J. Wilders, Oxford 1967; Characters, ed. C. W. Daves, Cleveland, OH 1970; Prose Observations, ed. H. de Quehen, Oxford 1979. A. E. Richards, Hudibras in the Burlesque Tradition, New York 1937; G. Wasserman, Samuel ‘Hudibras’ Butler, Boston, MA 1989.

1

One of the many cases of homonymy of both Christian and surname in English literature, this Butler is distinguished from the Victorian author of satires and utopias by adding in brackets, in quotations, the title of their identifying works: Hudibras and Erewhon.

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most mentioned, books in the whole of English literature. The standard modern edition was published fifty years ago, and there is practically no critical bibliography to speak of, so that the common reader has only a vague idea of the kind of writing originated by Butler, which goes by the name of ‘Hudibrastic’. The poem itself has often been treated by experts with a kind of Crocian superciliousness, separating the defects (many) from the merits (few), without discussing or investigating the possibility that Hudibras might be an intertextual emulation, and, as such, the third greatest ‘epic’ poem in English2 after The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost. It incorporates, summarizes, and re-elaborates all the highlights of the epic genre, from Homer and Virgil down to Spenser, whose Faerie Queene was already a bastardized version of the epic known as the mock-heroic. Butler was more ambitious, and composed a miniature history of recent history, desecrating the heroic tradition and a theocratic Weltanschauung that appeared to be inviolable, surrounded as it was by its aura of myth. The scarcity of events in the poem is part of the process of the trivialization of the heroic; as always, the comic element is the product of the disproportion between a fact and a character’s reaction to it. Butler reduces Cromwell’s twenty-year rule to a quixotic battle against windmills, such as the attempt to ban bear-baiting, the kind of bloody street fight involving dogs and bears that rivalled the theatre in popularity; a hero’s amatory prowess is compromised in his attempt to win over a shrewd widow, not for love, but for money; Puritan ‘saintliness’ scandalously dons the cloak of Jesuitical casuistry3 in order to get round the condition imposed by the widow for her consent. In the final analysis, the main reason behind such a clumsy and loose-structured plot is that Butler needed some sort of stage on which to

2

3

Butler perhaps was promised, by the king, a prize of 300 pounds, which he never actually received. Only Pepys found nothing funny or witty in the work, thus beginning a debate between admirers and detractors. Soon after, Voltaire was to say the exact opposite. As soon as it was published, Hudibras found numerous heirs and imitators, and was translated into French and German. Voltaire himself attempted an abridged version. In I.3, vv. 499–500, the widow says to Hudibras: ‘And shown your Presbyterian wits / Jump punctual with the Jesuits’.

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exhibit his boundless appetite for parody, and for linguistic and stylistic extravagance. For him one event was as good as another, and in stylistic superfetation lies the strength of Hudibras. It is misleading to reduce it to a satire against the Roundheads, the Puritans, Presbyterians, and the other factions of the Civil War. It is, instead, one of the great English textbooks of style, wayward and cyclical, and a real feast of languages and discourse. 2. The few, and in some cases, contradictory, biographical data in our possession go some way to illustrating the external genesis of the poem. Butler, the son of a wealthy Worcestershire gentleman, was tutored by a local classical scholar, but did not go on to university. He was given employment as a secretary to various J. P.s and members of the aristocracy, among whom a duchess, who gave him free access to her extensive library. This was around the same time that Robert Burton was doing something similar elsewhere, on his way to becoming the author of the encyclopaedic Anatomy;4 the similarity between these two literary personalities is significant. He then entered the service of a certain Luke, a colonel in Cromwell’s army, who became one of the models for Hudibras. After 1660 he lived a retired life for about twenty years, mostly in the service of the Lord Governor of Wales, whom he accompanied abroad on several diplomatic missions. Besides Hudibras, he is said to have collaborated, along with others, in the writing of The Rehearsal.5 He died in poverty, embittered by the lack of recognition for his merits. He had married a rich widow whose inheritance was swallowed up in a series of reckless speculations. The courting of a widow is the longest episode in Hudibras, so that at least a third real candidate helped to mould the character, besides the two other obvious ones: Butler himself (a similar operation was to be carried out by Joyce with Bloom and his other alter egos). The first part of Hudibras appeared in 1662, the second in 1663,6 and the third, after a long break, in 1678. Butler probably intended to write a fourth part, to bring the total number of books up to 4 5 6

On several occasions, Butler met here the humanist, John Selden, from whom he absorbed various sceptical and anti-clerical ideas. The countess died in 1651, and Butler took to frequenting Cleveland and the Inns of Court. § 50.3. The dates on the frontispiece were, however, 1663 and 1664.

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the Virgilian standard of twelve, but even in this incomplete form – an anticipation of the nineteenth-century serialization of novels – Hudibras was hugely successful among all strata of society, from court to courtyard. Its subject matter was still very much alive in people’s minds, and his treatment of it provided a welcome breath of fresh air after twenty years of Puritan fog. It has been said, and it is obviously true, that Hudibras is the very opposite of Pilgrim’s Progress, in that it is a satire against cant, or religious fanaticism, which obnubilated consciences by means of the manipulation of the language used in propaganda and sermons. So the ideological genesis of Hudibras is a Hobbesian negation of all teleology, and the arraignment of ‘humanity’, or Bacon’s ideological battle against the ‘idols’. Butler writes the great farcical epic of Puritanism at a time when it was at last permitted to laugh and make fun of that grim regime. 3. As I have suggested, Hudibras originates in literature itself. It is a mighty, unparalleled, unique experiment. The mock-heroic poem was not fashionable at the time, and Butler was influenced by, at the most, a couple of rare contemporary examples of the genre, like Cotton’s translations of Scarron’s Vergile travesti. Cervantes already belonged to the distant past, as did Spenser and Rabelais. In fact, the only English forerunner of Butler is Skelton. In contents, Butler precedes Dryden and his political satire based on the binary structure of contemporary events, expressed in terms of biblical history. His frame of reference is the continental mock-heroic canon, but his allusions are rapid and schematic, with no suggestion of rifacimento. Spenser lends Butler his Hudibras, who becomes Don Quixote as well, because Ralpho is the testy, awkward squire based on Sancho, though Ralpho is also derived from Fletcher’s Burning Pestle. It is uncertain how much Butler knew of the Italian ‘macaronic’ canon.7 Such impulses are part of the confused background of recent history. The octosyllabic couplet was the metre daringly chosen to point the lowness of the subject matter. From the very beginning we find a host of stylistic oddities, like the exorbitant use 7

The ‘sources’ indicated by CHI, vol. VIII, 58–9, are all from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries; it is undoubtedly true that Butler had first-hand knowledge of the literary tradition, especially the French one, and that there are many borrowings from Rabelais.

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of parentheses, serious comparisons ironically contrasting with the comic status of the characters (Hercules, Aeneas, Ajax …), the protasis being both delayed and defective. Butler’s text gleams with Latinisms and words from other languages, fresh coinages, sectorial lemmas, and his monosyllabic world is sometimes visited by a lumbering tetrasyllabic monster. Other words are used with an off-centre, playful semantic charge. All in all, his poetic lexicon is uniquely personal, with a great variety of registers: dreamily romantic and suggestive couplets topple over dizzy precipices into the downright ridiculous. As the editor Gilfillan remarked, Butler looks ahead to the Byron of Don Juan, as can be seen, if further proof were needed, in the false, cacophonic rhymes, and simple assonances and consonances, which, far from being a sign of approximation and carelessness, are a refined play of tension between apparently dissimilar objects and concepts.8 The first of the nine cantos making up the three parts begins with the static, Chaucerian description of the omniscient pedantry of Sir Hudibras; then the focus shifts to his physical appearance, his beard, paunch, buttocks, his weapons, his throat, representing his love of food. The portrait is Arcimboldesque in its wealth of surreal, monstrous details: his pantaloons are stuffed with provisions, and his sword sheath is full of broth. The defenders in the combat between dogs and bears have outlandish Italian or Spanish names like Crowdero, Magnano, Trulla, Orsin and Talgol, the latter – a butcher – maybe derived from ‘Tagliagola’, meaning a ‘cut-throat’. In the rest of the poem, as Johnson complained, ‘more is said than done’: Butler always excels in the static presentations (he was also a mediocre painter, whose canvases, according to Johnson, were used to keep out the draughts at the windows!) and in concerted dialogues, while he was less successful in handling a diegetic plot and as a narrator. Frequent metapoetic asides reveal the presence of the coordinator. There is a particularly Byronic tone in the beginning of the second canto, which, in the course of a critical discussion on genres, dismisses a swashbuckling, duelling solution, and opens the romantic parenthesis of the knight’s love affairs. The plot is based on improbability and unpredictability, and the knight is distrait, illogical and moody like the characters of Byron. In the long dialogue 8

To give a random example: ‘pug’ – ‘synagogue’ (III.3, ll. 166–7).

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between Hudibras in chains and the widow, after an exchange of promises and threats, snatches of poetry are heard, so parodistically authentic as to rival Marlowe’s lovers, and the widow quite rightly denounces a deliberate ‘poetic rapture’. The second canto of the second part, too, opens with a bizarre discussion about how oaths may be broken. The long debate between the knight and his squire is meant to parody legal slang as well as the language and slogans of Puritan tracts and theological writings. The never-ending discussion goes round in circles, like some of Browning’s monologues (or Joycean pastiches), with much use of specious and unsophisticated argument. The episode at the house of the astrologer, Sidrophel, where Hudibras goes for advice on how to obtain the widow’s consent, ends in yet another satirical tour de force, this time aimed at the cant used by astrologers. In the third part, Hudibras goes back to the widow and tells her he has kept his promise, and has flagellated himself. Then, quite unexpectedly, idealistic Hudibras rejects the concept that marriage is a form of torture, and attacks the cynical scepticism of the widow, who appears to have read Milton’s divorce pamphlets. Sidrophel’s supernatural agents, who arrive with the intention of whipping Hudibras for his lies, are in reality ‘heavies’ sent by the widow to make him confess his deception. Hudibras faces a barrage of questions, and answers them all with the most repulsive Puritan hypocrisy and selfrighteousness. The foundations of the Reformation crumble in the face of this surreal onslaught. The second canto of the third part is suspensive, and demonstrates the pessimistic degeneration of the revolutionary cause: the picture of Cromwell’s rule as drawn by Butler is one in which everyone has an opinion, and stands up to declare it and to put forward the most absurd proposals. What we have here is a fantastical account of the historical phenomenon of de-Cromwellianization. Lilburne’s long harangue is also the parody of a political speech. The third, and last, canto picks up the storyline again with the knight’s visit to a lawyer, followed by another bump in the narrative – the letter that Hudibras writes to the widow, who repudiates him, reminding him of how much she dislikes him, and how deeply she believes in the power women have in worldly affairs. It is an abrupt ending, which obviously leaves much to be desired. 4. Butler’s other main work, written quite some time after Hudibras, is Characters, a collection of more than 200 prose portraits of human types

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that amounts to a complete and thorough cross-section of Restoration society. All his other poetic writings were collected much later, in 1759, by a librarian in Manchester, under the title of Genuine Remains. In a series of satires, Butler launches a savage attack on the very foundations of late seventeenth-century society – poetry and drama, the ‘lascivious court of Charles’, ‘the weakness and misery of the human condition’, and, above all, in ‘The Elephant in the Moon,’ written in two different metrical forms, the Royal Society, which, in his opinion (and that of Swift) wasted its time and energy on absurd and unpractical projects. § 63. Oldham Samuel Butler and John Oldham (1653–1683) are usually mentioned together: both are satirists, and the only poets of any value, along with Dryden, in the last years of the century. In reality, in many ways they are quite different – according to some parameters, diametrically so. Both became famous between 1670 and 1680, although Butler was old enough to be Oldham’s father. It seems they never actually met. The heart of the matter is that one was in favour of Puritanism and the other against; they had different ideas on Catholicism, and on the political division represented by Tories and Whigs; one was progressive, the other, conservative. Above all, they differ in the colour and tone of their satire, resulting from that fact that one, Oldham, was a university-educated classicist, while the other, Butler, was in a sense a self-taught scholar who had had the opportunity to browse at will and at length in well-furnished libraries, reading and absorbing in complete freedom. However, the greatest difference between the two is that for Oldham the subject matter is more important than form, or, at least, the form is not particularly cultivated, while for Butler it is exactly the opposite. Oldham’s rhythm is too marked and monotonous, his rhymes are imprecise and truly cacophonic, and his style is sloppy and approximate. Butler places the filter of parody between himself and his subject, while Oldham throws his whole self into his loud and persistent perorations. It is superfluous to add that Butler audaciously chooses to write a mock-heroic poem, while Oldham, with few exceptions, follows the well-worn road of the panegyric, the elegy, ode, dedication, and paraphrase from Greek and Latin. On the other hand, it is precisely because his satire is more

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subjective, and his style so transparent, that nowadays Oldham is more popular than Butler, who fails to arouse interest, while Oldham’s works have been republished, and quite a number of critical essays and books written on him.1 His profile is that of an eccentric, though not exceptionally gifted, writer. He was the classic upright man who may be beaten but never cowed. He lived without flattery and without the theatre, a source of income for many, some of them part-time authors and actors. Naturally, his situation was aggravated by the fact that he was the son of a stubbornly Dissenting minister, a Presbyterian, to be precise (like Butler’s Hudibras), who after the Restoration was deprived of his living. He might have followed in his father’s footsteps, but decided not to. He accepted a post as schoolmaster, then tutor.2 He was said to be as thin as a rake, emaciated, quite ugly, his face always twisted into a grimace. He chose to be a satirist because he felt excluded, and for this reason was ambitious and wrote compulsively. For a poet who died at thirty, and while he lived was forced to work for his bread, Oldham, as though possessed by a demon, wrote an enormous number of works, the most important of which are the four Satyrs upon the Jesuits. No holds are barred in these and other satires, which attack their victims without mercy or respite. Oldham spurns the euphemistic softening of his blows, so much so that he was called the English Juvenal. In an elegy,3 Dryden discreetly suggested his limitations, saying, in short, that he did the best he could. Pope was the last of his admirers, after whom he slipped into oblivion. The current revival of interest is linked to two aspects of his work that have little to do with satire as such: he is a great impersonator, using a vaguely Browninguesque dramatic monologue; and

1 2

3

Poems, ed. H. F. Brooks and R. Selden, Oxford 1987, marked the beginning of a renewed interest, as proved also by various selections of his poems. The long title of this satire, addressed to a friend who is ‘about to leave the University, and come abroad into the world’, describes perfectly the lack of opportunities in the intellectual job market at the end of the seventeenth century. At the centre of the satire is the parable of the wolf who is attracted by the safer existence of the house dog, until – and this is symptomatic of Oldham’s unbounded pride – he sees the marks of the collar on the dog’s neck. § 51.5.

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he was a prolific translator/author of rifacimenti. His versions of Horace and Juvenal not only move the scene from Rome to London, changing the Latin names into English ones, and modifying appropriately the references to history and current events; they also succeed in containing and disciplining his apparently limitless flow of rhetoric, for the simple reason that the starting point is well-marked and unchangeable. One of  his best works in this genre is a paraphrase of  Horace’s Ars poetica, together with that of the ninth satire against the ‘impertinent button-holer’. 2. Oldham’s first work, at least as far as we know, was an elegy dedicated to a friend by the name of Morwent, who died young in 1674 or 1675. Forty-two twenty-line stanzas may well be a dimension expected of Cowley’s Pindaric ode (Cowley was the young Oldham’s guiding spirit), but seem excessive given the relative obscurity of the deceased, of whom we know little more than that he was a charitable, even Christ-like figure. Some have wished to see a self-portrait between the lines. The glorification of the subject becomes morbidly hysterical, and contains a magnificent attack on fops, accused of being a bad example to society. A later satirical poem ‘against virtue’, written in the style of Rochester, was misunderstood by readers, and taken as a defence of an immoral life style. Oldham set things right with an ‘apology’ and an ‘answer’. It is significant, however, that even after he became an unpaid teacher in a primary school in Croydon, with very little time for writing, Oldham continued to experiment in the impersonation of figures and voices that represent the opposite of what he really thought and fought for – a strange manifestation of weakness, or flirting with perversion, or maybe a vicarious and virtual search for thrills. The ambitious Oldham circulated his Croydon poems among friends; they came to the attention of Rochester, who liked the impersonation, deduced that Oldham was a ‘follower’ of his, and wished to enrol him in the ‘merry gang’ of libertines. Together with Sedley and Dorset, he went to Oldham’s school to meet him in person. Oldham then wrote a Sardanapalus and other erotic poems. In 1678, he left Croydon after teaching there for three years, and became the tutor of a nobleman’s son. He was about to change his register and write softer, more urbane satires, perhaps less arid and prosaic than those he had composed so far, when he fell into the whirlpool of the Popish Plot. His satires against the Jesuits appeared from 1679 to

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1681, when the whole series was collected. Nothing could have gone down better: the Jesuits had been a favourite target of writers since the days of Elizabeth, and many had been infected by this fashionable phobia. That there was a continuity, and that the Jesuits had a carefully prepared plan to extend their influence far and wide, is proved by the fact that Oldham draws parallels with the two Jesuit conspiracies of 1605 and 1678. In the first satire, the ghost of Garnett, the Jesuit provincial, executed in 1606, incites the supposed Jesuit conspirators of the present. After Oldham’s personal invective in the second satire, the third has St Ignatius pronouncing his last will and testament on his deathbed. The peak of Oldham’s poetry, from a visual and descriptive point of view, comes at the beginning of the saint’s speech, before the author is carried away by wordiness. Loyola quotes Milton’s Satan spurring on his fallen army. Oldham cannot but refer to the well-worn comparison between Loyola and Machiavelli, but, once again, he is revealed as a skilful prophetic impersonator reminiscent of Browning, drawn as he is by the curiosity to ‘become’ people he actually opposed and hated. In the fourth satire, the theme is an aspect of Catholic superstition that never failed to cause a sensation – miracles – obviously seen as tricks. Taken altogether, the anti-Jesuit satires are exaggerated and hysterical,4 and place great strain on the reader’s tolerance. Meanwhile, Oldham had arrived in London, and had become part of the court of Dryden, who, not yet a declared Catholic, respected and admired him. The Poems of 1681, significantly, bears no dedication. In the next collection, published in 1683, the ghost of Spenser advises the writer to give up poetry, as there is no money in it. § 64. Restoration historians. Clarendon, Burnet Seventeenth-century historiography begins in 1622 with Bacon’s History of the Reign of Henry VII, followed, in 1649, by Herbert of Cherbury’s study of Henry VIII. During and after the Civil War, and throughout the Restoration period, each historian attempted to defend one or other of the various opposing factions. The great histories of the Civil War were

4

SEL, 165.

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written while the war was taking place, but were published later, when the political temperature had cooled to more acceptable levels. The leading figure among late seventeenth-century historians was Edward Hyde, first Earl of Clarendon (1609–1674). None were as qualified as him to speak from personal experience: he had been a counsellor to Charles I, and Lord Chancellor to Charles II after 1660; he was also the father-in-law of the future James II, and, therefore, grandfather of queens Mary and Anne. His ‘true and historical’ account of the Rebellion and Civil War in sixteen volumes was begun in 1646 in the Isles of Scilly and Jersey during the exile of Charles I, and completed during a second exile in France, where he died, after being removed from office in 1666 following the debacle of the Dutch wars and the machinations of various courtiers and mistresses of the king. Part of a previously written autobiography was included in his history. The finished work was not published until 1702–1704.1 Clarendon’s History takes the form of a memoir, and is therefore presented as an eye-witness account. This is largely, but not only, because, given the circumstances in which it was written, he had no access to the necessary historiographical material and to tools such as letters, despatches, or archival documentation. Notwithstanding the nearness in time of the events described, Clarendon manages to remain impartial and objective. Naturally, he could be nothing but monarchist and Anglican, but, even as his close advisor, did not hide the faults of Charles I. In an attempt to maintain a balance, he mixes praise with reproval. The Restoration marked the return to an institutional regime whose equidistance from fanaticism, especially Puritan, was guaranteed by an Anglican king, who respected and protected law and order in the land. The bloody events of the rebellion were put forward as a solemn warning against all future attempts to tear apart the now united society. The philosophy behind Clarendon’s history is a vision of the interplay of providence and human responsibility, in which man is seen as a creature, not just possessing, but ruled by free will. His is a history made by men and of decisions made by men, both weak and strong, rather than by movements or ideas. 1

The proceeds from the sales of the work were paid to the University of Oxford, where they were used to establish the great publishing house that bears his name, the Clarendon Press.

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His impartiality can be seen clearly in the famous portrait of Cromwell,2 whom he might have been tempted to attack fiercely. Educated at Oxford, an expert in Greek and Latin historiography, his writing is solemn and balanced, with continual corrections and nuancing that are the stylistic equivalent of his ideological equilibrium. His account proceeds by means of static portraits, or ‘characters’, a fashionable genre at that time, and by means of succinctly, but vividly, recreated episodes. 2. Gilbert Burnet3 (1643–1715) led a feverishly active life, full of ideological and intellectual twists and turns. A Scottish professor of theology, he was at first Episcopalian, and therefore against the Covenant, and later a king’s preacher in London; as a wavering fisher of sinners’ souls he confessed the dying Rochester,4 and castigated the immoral conduct of the king himself, finding himself out of favour when he protested too loudly against the royal leanings towards Catholicism. In 1687 he was exiled, and took refuge at the court of William of Orange, who, after the Glorious Revolution, rewarded him with the archbishopric of Salisbury. He was a protégé of Queen Anne and wrote a long commemoration of her. He began his intense writing career with a series of lives, panegyrics, and minor historical works (1676), which derived a certain degree of authority from the inclusion, in the text, of authentic documents.5 He then published an account of Rochester’s death, and a remarkable translation of More’s Utopia. Above all, he is remembered for his timely, and popular, history of

2

3

4 5

Praz, SSI, vol. II, 23, maintains that Clarendon was one of those historians who presented Cromwell to the world as an astute Machiavel, obviously not having understood that the Florentine philosopher had republican sympathies. In reality, this clashes with Clarendon’s statement that ‘Cromwell completely rejected Machiavelli’s method’. It is widely believed that Clarendon had a thorough knowledge of the writings of the Florentine secretary. A namesake, Thomas Burnet (1635–1715), who died in the same year, but was ten years younger than Gilbert, was also a theologian, but not a Scot. As a scientist, he published Telluris Theoria Sacra (1684) and other works of an esoteric and semiheretical nature, that induced the king to remove him from his office at court. § 61.1. A method acquired through reading four or five times Paolo Sarpi’s Historia del Concilio tridentino [History of the Council of Trent] (CHI, vol. IX, 197).

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the Reformation (1679–1681) a violently anti-Catholic answer to a French pro-Catholic text, also based on original documents. The History of My Own Times, mostly posthumous (1724–1735), is, however, his most readable and enjoyable work: a mixture of anecdote and gossip, it was a subject of debate for Tories in the early eighteenth century, and also criticized for the inclusion of facts of which Burnet had no direct knowledge. As a historian, he is more modern than Clarendon, and rings loud the Whig bell of Latitudinarianism. He lacks, however, Clarendon’s genius and verbal skills. Confused and fanciful, he was disliked intensely by Swift, who dedicated several venomous lines to him in his own copy of Burnet’s works. § 65. Pepys* After Malory’s Arthurian romance, and the poems and meditations of Traherne, the Diary of Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) is the third most famous case of a text exhumed and reinstated in the canon of English literature with a delay of scores, or even hundreds, of years. The son of a tailor, Pepys went to Cambridge thanks to a scholarship and the influence of a relative who had become a peer. He was given a post in the administrative section of the Navy, without, at the beginning, the necessary skills. But he learnt quickly, and in 1673 was appointed secretary to the Admiralty. It was in 1660 that he wrote the first page of a diary he was to keep for nine years. On his death it was placed in his personal library and made available to the public in 1705. Later, together with his collection of rare books, prints and objets d’art, it was donated to the library of Magdalene College, Cambridge. The other great contemporary diarist, Evelyn, had informed the English reading public of the existence of Pepys’s diary, but no great interest was shown, until, in 1819, a Reverend John Smith began working on the six volumes of manuscripts, all of them in a kind of shorthand. Smith took three years to decipher the whole diary, which was published in an expurgated form *

The Diary, ed. R. Latham and W. Matthews, Berkeley, CA 1970–1983, from which is drawn The Shorter Pepys, London 1985; a shortened Italian translation, Diario (1660–1669), trans. M. Dandolo, has an interesting introduction by G. Almansi, Milano 1982. A. Bryant, Samuel Pepys, 3 vols, Cambridge 1933–1938, repr. London 1948; I. E. Taylor, Samuel Pepys, Boston, MA 1989; C. Tomalin, Samuel Pepys, New York 2002.

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in 1825, then again, complete, in 1893. The unexpurgated diary, in eleven volumes, appeared between 1970 and 1983. I will speak later of the reasons that induced Pepys to terminate the diary in 1669, after which date he began collecting various titles and prestigious appointments. He was a prisoner in the Tower for a short period, charged with conspiracy at the time of the Popish Plot of 1678, and released. For two years, from 1684 to 1686, he was President of the Royal Society, and in 1690 he wrote his memoirs of the Navy. 2. In a romance written at Cambridge when he was twenty, Pepys had demonstrated the stirrings of a literary ambition that was never fully realized, but instead, suffocated for unknown reasons. He destroyed the manuscript ten years later. Similarly, he discontinued the diary in 1669. Pepys continued writing, on and off, for another thirty-five years, but never produced anything so private and revealing. Officially, the diary was closed because Pepys became blind, or thought he would go blind, given that his sight was gradually becoming weaker. The last page states, quite bluntly, that he would soon have to dictate his entries to an amanuensis, and that the whole world would know about his irrepressible sensuality, and, in particular, his advances to his servant, Debbie. The diary ends on a note of regret, echoing Prospero’s farewell in The Tempest: ‘And so I betake myself to that course, which is almost as much as to see myself go into my grave’. I will come back to this syndrome of a Brontëan Rochester ante litteram, as if his blindness were punishment for his sins of the flesh, and a divine injunction against all future pleasures deriving from the faculty of sight. For a start, the six volumes – well-bound with his family arms – contained nine years of diaries, each consisting of about 350 pages. It is an open and closed text, not a farrago. There is a short general proem, and, more importantly, a highly polished epilogue. In between, are a number of short chapters, one for each day of the year. Everything argues against the supposition that Pepys did not want his diary to be read, which is what many commentators and editors have ingenuously claimed. It is not true that he did not want to make a book of it, as affirmed by the authoritative Le Gallienne;1 the opposite is true. What has been disproved, on the

1

In the preface to his abridgement of the diary, New York 1921, vii.

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basis of an examination of the manuscripts, is the idea of the spontaneous, unrevised composition: in reality, fair copies of many passages were made from rough drafts or notes. This is the work of a conscious artist. By statute, the only intended reader of a diary is the writer’s self, but this often masks some remote, undeclared, or denied intention to publish, if only posthumously. Like letters, diaries included in a literary canon are there in a very elastic sense: their value is primarily instrumental, their aim, in the first case, to communicate without any aesthetic ambition, in the second, a memory aid for the writer. Diaries written there and then, for personal use, to record impressions of and reactions to various happenings, usually lack one, sometimes two, of the three prerequisites of literary composition: they have no addressee, or the addressee is the same as the writer, and they have no code – while some, as in the case of Pepys, not only use a ‘style’, but are protected by the use of shorthand or codification. What I am trying to say, in short, is that Pepys’s diary, like Hopkins’s poetry, was written in the awareness that one day it might, indeed would, be published. In fact, one suspects that Pepys himself, with all his candour, was behind this great literary thriller, and he can be seen secretly rubbing his hands at the thought that one day his diary would be pored over by a cryptologist. The analysis carried out on the diary has provided proof that it was not written purely for personal use. It is then far from certain that ‘its pages were never intended to be seen by other eyes than those of the writer’.2 3. A discussion of the two most famous English diarists of the end of the seventeenth century is usually preceded by a few reflections on the rise of the genre, which is linked to the development of individualism and self-examination, not only in the middle class, and not confined to male authors. It has been pointed out that a diary like that of Pepys takes and transforms, though not completely, the idea of the examination of conscience, which, before being taken over by the Puritans, had been adopted by religious poets like Donne and Herbert, influenced by Catholic, and primarily, Jesuit, spiritual exercises. This is particularly true in the case of

2

CHI, vol. VIII, 252.

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Pepys, whose diary records, in a kind of double time, an endless series of weaknesses, mainly of a sexual nature, followed, after a pause, by robust reproval by his conscience, and resolutions to sin no more. Pepys is thus penitent and confessor at the same time. Above all, the diary is a sieve through which the public history of the time is filtered by a witness privileged to be very close to the centres of power. The diary is an alternative way of writing history, absorbing events as they happen rather than afterwards. All analysis, no synthesis. The compulsive recording of public events is punctuated by scenes of family life, involuntary comedy routines, full of faux pas and jokes.3 So the two reference points are daily routine – in the long run, repetitive and a little boring, despite the interludes mentioned above – and the great public events that shape and support the narrative – the return of Charles II from the Low Countries (Pepys had taken part in the expedition), the plague of 1665, and the Great Fire a year later. He switches register, from the confessional, to the descriptive: we see Defoe in the long sections on the Fire, while in his courtship of the maidservant, and the consequent disapproval of his wife, there is more than a hint of Sterne the humourist. From beginning to end, Pepys’s diary is a map, in which the itineraries of the author are always indicated with precision. Far from sedentary by nature, he moves from one part of the city to the other, always looking and watching (the eyes are the gateway of temptation), hungry for new experiences and new pleasures. Pepys’s London as it emerges from his diary can be compared with that of Dickens, or to Joyce’s Dublin, the geography of which underpins Ulysses. It is a kind of journal or bulletin, a non-stop outpouring, always the same but always changing imperceptibly, of the daily schedule of a civil servant who, after his busy morning’s work, found time and occasion for pleasure and company. Sunday is still the Puritan Lord’s day, and righteous Pepys goes to church, listens to and ponders the sermon; at times his attention wanders, and he finds himself flirting openly with some lady who seems to welcome his advances. He is of great assistance, especially to the student of seventeenth-century 3

At the age of twenty, Pepys married the twenty-two-year-old daughter of a French Huguenot émigré. She died at just twenty-nine. Pepys never married again, and had no children.

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theatre, in the reconstruction and evaluation of the tastes of the average theatre-goer, a little old fashioned and, even, philistine. Particularly useful are his comments on the first performances of new plays or the classics of the Elizabethan and post-Elizabethan theatre, which provided most of the material for the newly opened playhouses after 1660. Like the true Jonsonian he professed himself, he has left many trenchant asides, as well as a few inconsiderate comments. He was also ‘guilty’ of certain inexplicable infatuations resulting from his eccentric, or uncultivated taste: for example, he enthused over The Adventure of Five Hours by a certain Tuke,4 adapted from a 1663 Spanish text, which drew a now legendary expression of praise from him. 4. As it constitutes a calendar of the period 1660–1669, and is a real public and private journal, Pepys’s diary should be read for its high points, for those passages dedicated to special, unusual events, rather than the routine of everyday life. We might call it one big dictionary, to be leafed through and used as such, or start from the index, always present in modern editions, and go straight to the name or event of interest, and be sure of finding information and eccentric, original comments. Various editors, after the first edition, reduced the original text both for reasons of ‘decency’, and because, after a while, it becomes tiresome. I have mentioned Joyce’s Ulysses, another masterpiece accused by its first readers of being boring, so let me continue with an examination of the many analogies between the form and contents of the Diary and Ulysses. Pepys might be defined as the foreshadowing of the homme moyen sensuel. The various word portraits of Pepys are surprisingly applicable to Bloom in each of the individual character traits: both love the theatre, and opera in particular, both have quite common tastes, not excluding kitsch, as seen in the aforementioned praise by Pepys of mediocre plays which he placed above the immortal masterpieces of Shakespeare. Pepys was married to a very young wife, and they were mutually unfaithful, though, like Bloom, he was also uxorious; he was unfaithful, but jealously kicked against his wife’s affairs. Like Bloom, he could not help flirting in church. He was a libertine and a Don

4

Sir Samuel Tuke (1615–1674).

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Juan, who, fixated on a particular aspect of eroticism, would give way to endless digressions on the subject. He had a fetish about underwear, laces and gloves. He cultivated odd scientific interests. He was a gentle, moral Epicurean, who accepted his bodily urges as natural, and wrote them down only to repent later, with a touch of hypocrisy. Naturally, the code and the language of the diary are, in themselves, mightily similar to the flow of the stream of consciousness. The elliptical syntax (for example, of the subject of sentences), and fragmented elementary and molecular unity of verb and predicate preannounce the modernist style, as do the multilingual descriptions of his sexual exploits. Strange to say, the tale of intended betrayal, begun or concluded, recounted in his diary by Pepys, is enveloped, as soon as the events take place, or are remembered, in a cloud of ambiguity, such that the mixture of rapture and rebuke, promises and more bursts of sensuality, seems to look ahead to, not the monologues of Leopold Bloom, but those of Molly. § 66. Evelyn It is common practice in literary histories to measure Pepys’s diary against that of John Evelyn (1620–1706), usually with the former emerging as the winner. However, the two diaries are, in fact, too far apart for any meaningful comparison to be made, based as they are on two literary modes and systems that have little in common, and are the expression of two quite different personalities. Evelyn’s diary, too, was brought to light more than a century after the author’s death: to be precise, it was discovered in 1813, and published in part five years later, and in its entirety in 1955.1 As it is not in shorthand, one can be fairly sure that its author wished it to be made public, or at least was not averse to other people reading it. What stands out is that Pepys’s coverage of nine years takes three or four times the space Evelyn dedicated to eighty-six years – from 1620 to 1706. With reference to the same years, the two diaries provide a kind of stereophonic 1

Editions: H. B. Wheatley, 4 vols, London 1879; A. Dobson, 3 vols, London 1906, and, the definitive one, E. S. de Beer, 6 vols, Oxford 1955. An anthology of his other works, never before collected in their entirety, is edited by G. de la Bédoyère, Woodbridge 1995.

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account of the same historical events – the plague and the Great Fire, above all, with the Dutch War in the waters of the Thames. The diaries interact and liaise. Pepys never mentions Evelyn, but Evelyn does refer to Pepys, who died before him, and inserts a eulogy in the pages of his journal. The main difference, however, lies in the style: many of the entries in Evelyn are typical of any diary: simple, brief notes on normal, everyday happenings. In general, there appears to be a great gap between the immediacy of the lived experience and the pondered, thoughtful account if it, and not only because the first pages, which deal with his life from infancy up to the age of twenty, were written much later. Evelyn is a classical, Apollonian diarist, while Pepys is Dionysian and Romantic, as exuberant and intemperate, innocent and revealing, as Evelyn is formal, contained, careful and a little cold. He never comes near to breaking through the barrier of discretion that for Pepys means nothing. For Evelyn, a diary is not an unrestrained private outpouring: it has rules of decorum to be respected. We have seen how often Pepys describes his attempts to win over some woman or other, and how often he commits the most embarrassing faux pas in his dalliance. Evelyn would never have courted so openly, or made advances to chambermaids or any other compliant lady. If he did, he would have kept quiet about it. The two diaries also differ in the subject matter and interests they speak of. Evelyn is eclectic, a man of refined tastes and wide-ranging interests; he is even a little snobbish. Pepys favours the commonplace, and even finds room for kitsch. Lastly, their space-time coordinates are different: those of Pepys are the confines of London; the first part of Evelyn’s diary, more than a third of the whole, is a colourful account of his travels. Only after 1660 does it become ‘just’ a diary of life in London, with varying degrees of interest. 2. Evelyn considered no part of the knowledge accumulated in the course of history a se alienum. Interested in everything, he was an encyclopaedist ante litteram. Not only was he learned in the humanities: he was also an expert in science and the visual arts, and, as such, a member of the Royal Society. He had unusual hobbies like numismatics, horticulture and herbalism. He can rightly be called a ‘virtuoso’, a title that was fashionable at the time, implying great versatility. Yet his many-sided interests were accompanied by a keen sense of reality and responsibility. He was appointed

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by the Crown to several prestigious positions of great importance as a civil servant, expert, or assessor. He scrupulously and competently supervised the maintenance of London’s sewers, the policies for the reduction of smog,2 the building of a hospital for casualties of war, not to mention the city’s traffic regulations. After the Fire of 1666, he collaborated in the drafting of a plan for the reconstruction of the buildings that had been destroyed. In some respects, Evelyn was an Elizabethan Renaissance Platonist, 100 years on, a Sidney or a Spenser, idealizers of gentlemanliness, perfect, unshakeable deference to the sovereign, or incarnation of Elyot’s perfect, faultless ‘governor’. For this very reason, he is a straightforward writer, without flashes of genius, stylistic frills or feats: unpretentious, unassuming and untouched by the temptations of exasperated individualism. His Ficinian Platonism lives on thanks to the importance he attributes to human crafts and arts: time and again, a well-cared-for garden is declared to be a replica of Eden, and ‘the best representation of lost happiness’. Particularly Platonic was his affection for the young wife of the poet and diplomat Sidney Godolphin,3 who died in child-birth at the age of twenty-seven, and was revered as a saint. Evelyn wrote a moving memorial of her, which was published only in 1847. He had no time, only harsh words, for the rampant immorality of contemporary society. It is also true that he, like Thomas Browne, whom he admired,4 lived at a time of attempted mediation between traditional values (Evelyn was a convinced Anglican) and the essentially non-confessional culture of the day. Apart from the diary, his writings consist of a number of short, or slightly longer works, on a whole host of subjects. He also wrote poetry and translated, from the original French, a philosophical pamphlet on freedom and slavery, and from Latin, Lucretius. He also left a book on botany,5

2 3 4 5

See his 1661 pamphlet Fumifugium. § 40.1. Cf. diary entry for 17 October 1671. This is Sylva (1644), which deals with the need to plant more trees in England in order to build ships and also to favour the production of glass. Elysium Britannicum, a history of horticulture, occupied Evelyn for forty years, and was left unfinished. He is also credited with being one of the first ecologists.

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a comparison of English and French gardens, and other handbooks on aesthetics, painting, sculpture, architecture and town-planning.6 3. Evelyn’s diary may be divided, ideally, into three sections. The first, written retrospectively, tells of his forebears, his childhood, youth and years at university before going on to his travels on the Continent, the first of which took place, prudently, on the eve of the Civil War, when Evelyn left the Low Countries for the court in exile in France. There he met and married the very young daughter of a nobleman of tried royalist faith. From France he went on to Italy. By the mid-1640s he had gone as far as Rome and Naples, and back north as far as Lombardy and the Veneto. This first volume is the best of the three, and still rewards reading as an early example of travel literature: it begins like an ordinary guide, but soon breaks into minute architectonic descriptions that remind the reader of Ruskin, and, in the occasional sketches of customs (especially in Rome and the Papal court), of Dickens. Following in the footsteps of Milton, Evelyn went to Geneva and there met Giovanni Diodati, the uncle of Milton’s bosom friend, mourned in his famous elegy. A second, shorter, stay in Paris probably ended with Evelyn’s definitive return to England and the ancient manor house of Sayes Court. After 1652 the diary becomes more factual and detached, though lit up from time to time by various anecdotes, like the ambush by the cutpurses, or the spectacle of the Turkish acrobat or Cromwell’s funeral, described with a touch of sadism. The forty years after 1660 were spent, as I mentioned, in a frenetic succession of journeys the length and breadth of England on the king’s service. This did not prevent Evelyn from cultivating his numerous private interests. Of course, the diary abounds in entries about visits to eminent public figures, working lunches, religious services complete with sermons, obituaries and weddings, diplomatic missions and inspections. Evelyn had a soft spot for elegies. The routine of the diary is broken whenever he takes on the role of a purveyor of choice, refined sensations and experiences. ‘Rare’ and ‘rarity’ are words used with great frequency, and curiosity is Evelyn’s prime quality – curiosity for everything wonderful, a curiosity he held dear well into advanced old age. 6

He discovered and sponsored the wood-carver, Grinling Gibbons, and collaborated with Wren in the rebuilding of St Paul’s. He was also a student of surgery and physiology.

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§ 67. Temple Sir William Temple (1628–1699) is a marginal figure in seventeenthcentury literary history, remembered above all on two accounts: he was the husband of Dorothy Osborne, the daughter of the Governor of Guernsey, who, as a fiancée, wrote a series of ‘adorable’ letters between 1652 and 1654;1 his second claim to fame is that Swift acted as his secretary from 1690 to 1699, and was encouraged by him to write The Battle of the Books. It was while Swift was a member of Temple’s household that his ill-starred affair with Stella was born. In actual fact, Temple was a man of letters who had dabbled, unsuccessfully, in politics,2 and had retired, a wiser man, to his country estate in Sheen, though King William continued to visit him and ask him for advice. He had held important and sensitive diplomatic posts in the preceding twenty-five years. In 1668 he sealed the triple alliance between England, the Low Countries and Sweden, blocked by Charles II. In 1674 he was an intermediary in the nuptials between William and Mary. He was also the English ambassador in Ireland. His literary works, including memoirs and works on politics, were all written when he was an old man in retirement. They were collected in Miscellanea, in three parts, between 1680 and 1701. Swift edited his correspondence in 1700–1703. Temple wrote, not so much a diary, as personal and private essays, long, pleasant digressions in the manner of Montaigne, but much more superficial: they lack arguments, and meander aimlessly, without taking a stand on any of the burning issues of the time. They celebrate the productive meditation that is possible when one withdraws from the world. His easy, elegant prose was soon considered second only to Dryden’s, and Temple seen as the pioneer of a style of writing that was clear, correct, and free from extravagances. Johnson praised it, and confessed he had modelled his own style on it. His reputation began to fail after a long, hostile assessment by Macaulay (1838), who rightly castigated the far from elevated reasoning of his works and the great number of truisms and affirmations included in them that are debatable, if not downright wrong. Of Temple’s three most famous essays, the most fascinating is the one on the gardens of Epicurus, an early fruit

1 2

§ 71.1. SEL, 224.

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of English eccentricity, but also a distant relation of Walton’s Compleat Angler and the fantastical speculations of Thomas Browne. Never too syntactically complex, the essay is a rhapsodic idealization of ancient oriental gardens and that of the philosopher, Epicurus, with whom the author, in a way, identifies. As for Evelyn, here the well-tended garden embodies the Platonic idea of lost happiness.3 It gradually becomes an orchard, indeed the very orchard that Temple kept on his estate, full of peaches, apricots and figs. There follows a detailed discussion of the virtues of the various fruits, flowers and herbs, and the relative methods of cultivation. Also based to a large extent on his own experience is the essay on health, and the ‘recipe’ for a long life, based on the premise that health, happiness and well-being constitute the foundation of life itself. The secret of longevity lies in temperance and living in the open air. Temple gives the reader a short history of medicine, in the style of Robert Burton, piling up example upon example of people who lived to incredible ages with the help of onions, garlic, saffron and other herbs. Two of Temple’s essays deal with aesthetics and literary history, and are constructed on the premise of a general decline in values and beliefs since the days of the ancients, something believed by Macaulay as well. His essay ‘Of Poetry’ is equidistant: Temple finds the origin of poetry in divine furor, but it is also a craft and an exercise in common sense. Contrary to the rigid contemporary rules governing poetic composition, he favours freedom of movement and expression. At the end of the essay, however, he reverts to a sober, classical position, and repudiates comic, nonsense and Rabelaisian poetry. His intervention in the querelle des anciens et des modernes aroused the ire of scholars. Here Temple indeed adopts a viewpoint which is no longer Eurocentric, but embraces a much wider, interconnected cosmos, with Confucius placed on the same plane as Socrates or Pythagoras, and the events of antiquity of the Americas or the Orient just as important as those of Europe. Temple tries to prove that the roots of western culture are to be found in India and China. Bentley 3

A garden is the apotheosis of symmetry, but the Chinese placed in theirs the socalled sharawadgi, the principle of pleasing disorder. This is only a passing comment in Temple’s essay, but in the eighteenth century it was used to idealize the ‘natural’ garden.

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and Wotton were quick to point out Temple’s blunder when, in order to show the superiority of the ancients in every field of knowledge, he chose as a not very apt example, the merits of Aesop, and, especially, the spurious epistles of the despot of Agrigentum, Phalaris. § 68. Hobbes, Locke Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), also called Hobbes of Malmesbury from his place of birth, is present in this volume not only insofar as he is a key figure in the history of seventeenth-century ideas, of which the literature of the time is an expression. In reality, Hobbes started off as a writer, and turned to philosophy at a later date. In old age, he reverted to literature, at a time in which the branches of knowledge were not yet separated into distinct categories, and were all open to the curiosity of the educated reader. He became the philosopher of Leviathan, in other words, after debuting as a child prodigy of Latin and the humanities. He translated Euripides into Latin verse at the age of fourteen; in 1628, his first published work was a translation of Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War. At the ripe old age of eighty-four he wrote his, often humorous, autobiography in Latin. An ecclesiastical history in Latin verse was published posthumously in 1688. He ended his career as a translator, though not a very good one, of the two Homeric epics. So, his output was immense, also because he lived such a long life; he wrote Latin and English with the same ease. All he lacked was pure inventiveness.1 Without the body of his philosophical works between the head and the tail, Hobbes would be simply one of the many English authors who wrote in Latin, or one of the dozens of translators of Homer, or from Latin, or just another writer of memoirs and autobiographies. He does have a certain importance in the development of English prose, his style being clearly influenced by Thucydides – not particularly fine or elegant,

1

As a literary critic, Hobbes wrote, in 1650, a reply, only apparently eulogistic, to Davenant’s prologue to his own poem, Gondibert, admonishing the poet to stick to criteria of truth and verisimilitude. In the prologue to his Odyssey (1675) Hobbes advises poets to exercise firm control over the extravagances of fancy.

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but crystalline and to the point.2 Though a contemporary of Milton, his prose is much more modern. 2. When he died at ninety-one, faithful to the saying mens sana in corpore sano, Hobbes had lived long enough to span almost the whole of the seventeenth century. He had been born in the last years of the sixteenth century and died when the eighteenth was on the horizon. His philosophy is evolutionary, heterogeneous and impure because it brings with it the leftovers of the Aristotelianism it fights, and even a little medieval mouldiness; but he mixes it all with new blood, in particular, Cartesian mathematics, Galilean motion and post-Machiavellian politology. It is symptomatic that, although an atheist, or at least, non-religious, Hobbes could not resist the temptation to subject the Scriptures to animated discussion, to approve of, or take for granted, religious belief for political reasons, and kept an open mind on the Roman Catholic Church.3 When he was fifteen, he studied Aristotelian logic at Oxford, and developed a profound hatred for academic institutions. At twenty-two, he became a tutor to a nobleman, and accompanied him on his grand tour. In the 1630s he was in Paris with the nobleman’s son, and, on several occasions, met Descartes, to whom he made several objections concerning his writings. He also met Gassendi. In Florence, he was introduced to Galileo. A political tract written in 1640 already contains the seeds of Leviathan, with the difference that in it he states that democracy is the first form of human aggregation, but can degenerate into absolutism and despotism. His third continental journey was the most productive, because it was a result of the gathering political storm. He lived in Paris for eleven years, from 1640, reading and frequenting Descartes, publishing De Cive (1642) and laying the foundation for a Latin trilogy of natural and social history. Leviathan, the result of this long period of incubation, was published in London in English in 1651, while

2

3

Except in the third and fourth parts of Leviathan, where it is ‘expansive, at times wild, full of metaphors and occasionally fanciful insults’ (D. Runciman, reviewing a recent re-edition [TLS, 1 March 2013, 3–4]), mainly because in these parts the subject is religion. Hobbes never actually declares he is an atheist, but his ‘mechanistic materialism’ leads in fact to atheism.

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Hobbes was still in Paris. A copy of the book was donated to the king just as the author was about to return to England after tacitly acknowledging Cromwell’s government. Hobbes’s own Latin translation was published in Amsterdam in 1668, and contributed to its diffusion on the Continent. In the next thirty years, he was able to dedicate himself completely to his studies, thanks to a pension. He was engaged in many philosophical disputes with the establishment (on free will with Bishop Bramhall, and on various questions of mathematics and geometry with professors at Oxford), and at one point was forced to face charges of heresy, which led to his prudently burning a number of compromising documents. The posthumous Behemoth (1679–1682) is a dialogue on the Civil War. 3. At the heart of Hobbes’s philosophy lies an attempt to adapt Euclidian geometry, and Galilean science and physics, to philosophical problems, a line of thought that proved to be of lasting value through the centuries. Apperception in Hobbes is the pressure of objects communicated through their motion; ‘representation’ is another motion that reacts to the object’s motion on the subject. In logic, Hobbes favours the principle of noncontradiction: truth or falsity reside in words, not in things, and the criterion of truth is not a function of an ontological structure of reality. In ethics, motion governs the passions, by attracting and repulsing. However, Hobbes is important above all for his political vision. The origin of Leviathan may well have been not merely heuristic: Hobbes was born in the year of both uncertainty4 and security: the Spanish Armada had been defeated and destroyed with the help of the elements, and England’s borders were safe. The resulting sense of precariousness might have become particularly strong during the Civil War, giving rise to a harsh depiction of nature as an all-out, internecine war (the same harrowing image found at the end of Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’), sublimated into pure, detached philosophical argument. Individual freedom might, and must, be sacrificed for peace and self-preservation. The government of the civitas, once handed over to a central authority, instituted to protect, and invested with power thanks to a pact stipulated with the whole community, cannot be revoked. The governor 4

In his autobiography he says that, together with him, his mother had given birth to his twin sister, Fear.

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governs with absolute power and unlimited prerogatives. Above all, Hobbes feared anarchy. Rebellion is impossible, because, even if Leviathan were to go mad, it would be sufficient to neutralize the possible outbreak of civil war. Subjects are released from their obligation to obey only in the case of a sovereign who is incapable of offering protection to these same subjects. In international politics, Hobbesian philosophy is seen as defensive and protectionist, rather than offensive. It is dictated by an aspiration for peace and order and reflects a desire for an idealistic isolation from the rest of the world. It is likely that Orwell found in Hobbes the idea of permanent war, or the cold war, between three super-powers. In fact, Hobbes expressly foresaw only a continuous state of war with occasional interruptions. Like Orwell, he deplored the lack of an international governing body, which meant that human progress risked a boomerang effect, with the production of ever more destructive weapons. Only inefficiency could save mankind, in the absence of an impartial world government.5 His energetic defence of absolutism was repeatedly criticized as ambiguous, because it could be invoked to bolster and support quite different political regimes like Cromwell’s (Hobbes did actually accept the Commonwealth) and the restored Stuart monarchy. In the key section on the delegation of power, the delegate may be an individual or an assembly – that is, a parliament. The same section speaks of a mortal god that corresponds to the ‘immortal God’ above us.6 4. John Locke (1632–1704) constitutes a huge, macroscopic bump in western philosophy: Bertrand Russell spoke of an expressly Lockean line of development as opposed to one derived from Descartes, and through Descartes from Kant, and attributes to him an influence that reaches down to later English empiricists, and further ahead, to Bentham and Marx, not

5 6

HWP, 541. Leviathan aroused much controversy, not only among the clergy, and Hobbes was excluded from the pusillanimous Royal Society for being a heretic. After the Restoration his works had to be printed outside England as they were considered to be atheistic. In Oceana (1656) James Harrington (1611–1677) opposed Hobbes’s absolute monarchy with the utopia of a Cromwellian republicanism in which agrarian wealth is equally distributed. He admitted, however, that in situations of emergency a dictator may be needed to restore law and order. Other confutations came from, above all, Robert Filmer (§ 1.1 n. 2) and Joseph Glanvil (1636–1680), Arnold’s ‘scholar gipsy’.

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to mention the interest aroused by his political doctrines based on tolerance and moderation.7 At the same time, Locke, as a philosopher, had no ambition to erect general, totalizing structures, but based his arguments on the solid observation of reality. His Essay Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1690 after a gestation of twenty years,8 deals with the criteria for the authentication of knowledge and ideas, and how they are formed in the mind. At the same time, Locke draws a dividing line between that which can, and that which cannot be known. Locke’s ‘idea’ is, of course, not that of Plato, but derives from English empiricist literature going back to Roger Bacon and Ockham, grafted onto Descartes: in other words, it is a synonym for pure ‘mental content’. Locke denies the existence of inborn ideas, because ideas only reach the intellect through experience; the intellect is able to combine simple ideas, but these are always furnished by experience. However, mental activities are, in themselves, creators of new ideas. This consideration leads to a distinction between two kinds of ideas – ideas of ‘sensation’ and ideas of ‘reflection’. In the latter category, the mind becomes self-aware while still needing material derived from experience. To know, therefore, means to bring together similar ideas derived from experience, the only exceptions being the idea itself of thinking, which is self-evident, and the idea of the existence of God, which is intuitive. In ethics, Locke, a former Puritan, moves away from his original beliefs, like all empiricists, considering good and evil ‘not other than pleasure and pain’. As a political thinker, he posits a state of nature different to that of Hobbes, affirming that the delegation of authority to a sovereign may be revoked. He was a renowned advocate of freedom and tolerance, but excluded Catholics and atheists, the former because they swore allegiance to a foreign power 7 8

HWP 617–22. After leaving Oxford (where he studied philosophy and medicine, anatomy, physiology, and physics) Locke became a follower of the Earl of Shaftesbury, Dryden’s great enemy. After Shaftesbury’s death, he went to the Low Countries, where he paved the way for William of Orange. In 1688 he returned to England and wrote, in the last ten years of his life, treatises on government, education, and ‘the reasonableness of Christianity’. A number of comments and essays on the Pauline epistles and on miracles was published posthumously. An exchange of attack and counter-attack with Bishop Edward Stillingfleet on theological issues was published towards the end of the century.

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in the form of the Church of Rome. Nowadays, Locke’s primacy in the history of ideas is inversely proportional to the literary value of his prose. As I have said, Hobbes was, in part, a writer tout court; Locke was not. A contemporary of the author of Leviathan, he completed the process of the compartmentalization of knowledge that Hobbes had left unfinished. Each signified requires a specific signifier, and philosophy adopts neutral, functional, above all, semantically transparent words – the opposite, that is, of the self-reflecting, imaginative language of literature. It is not surprising, therefore, that Locke had no great liking for the literature of fiction, favouring as he did writing that served some definite purpose. The third book of the Essay takes issue with the abuse of language, and the lack of transparency inherent in figurative language. § 69. Bunyan* I: ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ The Pilgrim’s Progress was written in Bedford gaol, where John Bunyan (1628–1688), born in one of the suburbs of the town, had been imprisoned *

Works, ed. G. Offer, 3 vols, Glasgow 1857, now superseded by The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, ed. R. Sharrock et al., 13 vols, Oxford 1976–1994. Sharrock is also the editor of The Pilgrim’s Progress, Oxford 1960, and, with modernized spelling and without critical apparatus, Harmondsworth 1965. J. Brown, John Bunyan: His Life, Times, and Work, rev. edn by F. M. Harrison, London 1928; G. B. Harrison, John Bunyan: A Study in Personality, London 1928; E. A. Knox, John Bunyan in Relation to His Times, London 1928; W. Y. Tindall, John Bunyan: Mechanick Preacher, New York 1934 (invaluable reconstruction of late seventeenth-century Dissent, with Bunyan almost lost sight of in the crowds of preachers that throng the pages of this book; there is, however, nothing here of the brilliant, world-famous expert on Joyce and Dylan Thomas); H. Talon, John Bunyan: The Man and His Works, Eng. trans., Cambridge, MA 1951; R. Sharrock, John Bunyan, London 1954; O. E. Winslow, John Bunyan, New York 1961; U. M. Kaufmann, The Pilgrim’s Progress and Traditions in Puritan Meditation, New Haven, CT 1966; R. L. Greaves, John Bunyan, Abingdon 1969, and Glimpses of Glory: John Bunyan and English Dissent, Stanford, CA 2002; M. Furlong, Puritan’s Progress: A Study of John Bunyan, London 1975; L. V. Sadler, John Bunyan, Boston, MA 1979; The Pilgrim’s Progress: Critical and Historical Views, ed. V. Newey, Liverpool 1980; C. Hill, A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People: John Bunyan and his Church 1628–1688, Oxford 1988; T. Spargo, The Writing of John Bunyan, Aldershot 1997; M. Davies, Graceful Reading: Theology and Narrative in the Works of John Bunyan, Oxford 2002.

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for preaching without the authorization of the bishop. To be more precise, it is believed to have been written during the second of the two six-year periods of detention, which began in 1666.1 Bunyan could easily have taken advantage of the Act of Tolerance promulgated by Charles II, but he always refused to do so. The first part of the Progress was published in 1678, and the second in 1684. In the following century, the book acquired legendary, unprecedented popularity, as witnessed by the great number of editions – in England and English-speaking countries overseas – breaking all records, particularly among the poorer class of Nonconformist Protestants. It became every man’s companion and support, second only to the Bible. It is the second great Puritan epic, alongside, or rather, in opposition to Milton. As a proletarian writer, who exalts the Calvinist doctrine of salvation through grace – in other words, predestination2 – Bunyan formulates a veiled criticism of political power.3 Unlike Milton, Bunyan had no university education; he represented the Puritan mass, 1 2

3

Hill 1988, 199. Others indicate the date of composition in the further six months in gaol in 1675. Tempted by the Ranters, after he had moved towards the Baptists, Bunyan attacked the Quakers, and then the Latitudinarians, especially in the person of rector Edward Fowler (Tindall 1934, 42–59). His last collocation on the complicated chessboard of Dissent was, according to Tindall 1934, 3, with the Baptists, who followed Calvin, Congregationalist discipline, Sunday observance, and adult baptism by immersion. The founder of the Quaker movement, George Fox (1624–1691), himself the author of a famous diary published in 1694, was an itinerant preacher like Bunyan, more transcendental but less cultivated in a literary sense (Tindall 1934, 23). These travelling preachers belonged to an ever more numerous class of ‘mechanics’, a term that included (Tindall 1934, vii n. 1) farmers, rabbit breeders, bakers, tailors, shoemakers, who may or may not have abandoned their trades and become preachers, inspired by divine vocation or popular acclaim. All part of the movement of ‘enthusiasm’, these ‘mechanic’ preachers performed that ‘mechanic operation of the spirit’ satirized by Swift (§ 91). For an identification, albeit far from certain, of the real people behind the allegorical masks of Pilgrim’s Progress cf., once again, Tindall 1934, 60–7. Dissenting ‘enthusiasm’ was openly on the side of the poor and the oppressed, and had, therefore, political objectives, as demonstrated by Tindall 1934, 91–117 (and 114 on Bunyan’s thinking). Hill 1988, 215, too, accentuates the subversive strain underlying Bunyan’s work: ‘Undesirable characters in Pilgrim’s Progress, as later in The Holy War, are almost obsessively labelled as lords, or ladies, gentlemen or gentlewomen’.

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who knew nothing of Latin and Greek, and indeed could hardly read or write. However, Bunyan and Milton, taken together, show that English literature after the Restoration was, at the very least, ‘stereophonic’. In the last forty years of the seventeenth century, the two sources of energy were, on the one hand, the theatre, in its complete expression as performance, mocking religion by means of highly acrobatic compromises; on the other, the Bible, and the apocalyptic messages of preachers, at times, though rarely, elevated to the form given by Bunyan. These two parallel forces, representing different aesthetic objectives, addressed two different audiences: the court and the wealthy middle class of London on one side; on the other, the vast proletariat of tradesmen and artisans, especially in the outlying areas of the Midlands. Yet there is a link between Restoration theatre and Bunyan’s homiletics, because the theatre, too, adopts the tool of allegory, less developed, no doubt, and seen mainly in the semantically charged names given to characters, a trait that unites Bunyan to Etherege, Wycherley and Congreve. His lack of academic education was responsible for the long-standing misapprehension that Bunyan was an unpolished, primitive writer, devoid of any cultural background apart from the Bible, or, at the most, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. This is far from true: buried in the pages of Pilgrim’s Progress are many earlier landmarks, on which Bunyan builds, carefully and consciously, a great work of intertextual mediation. 2. Bunyan exploits and mixes, in the manner of a collage, several formulas and traditions, such as those belonging to fourteenth- and ­fifteenth-century romance, as well as Spenser’s surreal elements. Above all, he connects to the continental canon, starting from medieval dream literature. In Pilgrim’s Progress a dreamer narrates his dream in the first person, and the dream is that of Christian, who, one day, leaves the City of Destruction to reach, after many difficulties and trials, the Celestial City. ‘Christian’ is the same as ‘Everyman’: the vehicle is the same as used in the moralities, in Piers Ploughman and, since this is a dream allegory, the May morning oneiric vision that takes us back to the Roman de la Rose. It might even be a disguised parody of that poem. However that may be, in Tindall argues that Bunyan had contacts with and sympathy for the Fifth Monarchists (§ 1.6).

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the background can be heard echoes of the great text of the otherworldly journey of a spiritual pilgrim, a text that goes back even beyond Dante.4 Of course, Bunyan’s book is in prose, not verse, and belongs to the genre of allegory. These two formal characteristics are dictated by its didactic purpose. In 1678 Bunyan adopted a form that was already old-fashioned, last used by the poet Stephen Hawes in the early sixteenth century. With this regressive choice, Bunyan takes over the only vehicle that could obviate the charge or suspicion of self-reflection in his text. However, for Puritans, allegory was in itself suspect, and Bunyan seems to be obsessed by the possibility that his text might be judged too literary, or that the allegory might not be understood. The justification of allegory – which is figurative rather than direct and neutral – is given in an introductory ‘Apology’: the Old Testament, says Bunyan, and the New, and the Acts of the Apostles, all speak through images. Throughout the text, the author adopts measures to ensure transparency: reading guides, explanations, summaries, and confirmation of spiritual progress. So the Progress runs on two tracks, one allegorical, the other explanatory, aimed at enlightening whoever might not understand the ‘tenor’ of the allegory. This technique is not unlike that used by Joyce in various chapters of Finnegans Wake, itself a dream allegory. It is, in fact, a mixed formula: after the verse ‘Apology’, short passages of rhyming lines underscore important moments in the story (these lines are so deliberately pedestrian, not to say limping, as to read like a parody). To achieve greater immediacy, the dialogues are not composed of direct or indirect speech with captions, but in dramatic form, with speeches assigned to various named characters. Pilgrim’s Progress is therefore a very early example of the new literary genre, the novel, particularly the picaresque, with its scenes and caricatures of everyday life. Its comic dimension emerges in the second

4

Bunyan proclaimed himself illiterate, and said he got his knowledge of the Bible from current theological disputes. Tindall 1934, 190–214, shows, instead, the breadth of his knowledge of both Scripture and biblical references in English and European literature. He also cites echoes of Spenser, Milton, emblem tradition (Quarles and Wither), popular romances – practically all the fundamental texts, though, strangely enough, he does not mention medieval dream literature, Langland, or the Roman de la Rose.

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part, which has, however, a rhetorical purpose: to reiterate and underline Christian’s spiritual journey. The narrative is fast moving, a rapid succession of phantasmagorical images, never slowed down by analysis, with no division into chapters, but one continuous flow. 3. When he tells his family that he absolutely has to leave for the Celestial City, Christian finds himself isolated, and taken for a madman. Not even his wife and children understand him. Nonetheless, he follows Christ’s injunction, and leaves mother and father to follow his calling. All human relations pale into insignificance at the thought of salvation. Christian, who lives in the City of Destruction, is Lot and all the others who leave Sodom and Gomorrah. For a while he is accompanied part of the way by a few hardy friends, who soon, however, abandon him. As he goes on, signs of warning and persuasion become more frequent: an evangelist follows him like a shadow, and, after him, a Dantesque inner ‘interpreter’ who explains, also for the benefit of the readers, what is happening, and the meaning of the allegorical figures encountered on the way. As I have said, the features of the otherworldly journey are not new: castles, gardens, springs, hills, some steep, others suspiciously easy to climb, meadows full of blooming flowers and fair damsels. Apollyon, the dragon, is the scaly monster. Situations are repeated, with slightly different details, so that the Valley of the Shadow of Death is similar to the Slough of Despond, in which the pilgrim gets stuck almost immediately. Faithful appears by his side and turns out to be the objectivisation of his conscience. Visionary scenes separated by doctrinal interludes beat out the rhythm of Christian’s progress. The episode of Vanity Fair, with the surrealistic spectacle of fat, slimy creatures, like something from Langland’s Piers, ends with Christian’s ghostly trial on a trumped up charge of defamation. After the arrival in the Celestial City,5 the second part narrates, at length and with some repetition, the spiritual initiation of Christian’s female counterpart. Each of the various places and stages of Christian’s pilgrimage is revisited by his wife 5

The crossing of the river of death is reminiscent (though I find no trace of this in critical literature) of the Middle English poem Pearl (Volume 1, § 12.1–3), in which the protagonist sees his daughter in a dream. He attempts to join her as she points to the celestial city.

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and five children, in an atmosphere that, all of a sudden, has become less dreamy and hypnotized, with an increase, at times unjustified, of the fantastic (monsters appearing out of nowhere, as if by magic). There is also a certain amount of comedy, some of it desecrating. This comedy gets in the way of the edifying urgency: Christian’s children get indigestion by eating fruit, and need a doctor and a purge, but the purge contains the blood of Christ, because the tree from which they picked the undigested fruit represents the Tree of Knowledge. The aim of this second part is rhetorical and exhortative, but in a different way, and recalls, at a distance, the trials Christian has overcome, which are summarized and recounted over again, so as to be etched more deeply in the reader’s mind.6 § 70. Bunyan II: Other works on the contest between God and the devil The son of a travelling tinker, but descending from a family of landowners, Bunyan acquired a basic education at the local school, then threw himself into what he called a life of dissipation, accompanied, however, by a desire for redemption. He accused himself of four pastimes that he held to be sinful: dancing, bell-ringing,7 playing tipcat, and reading the romance of Sir Bevis of Hampton. At the age of seventeen, he enrolled in Cromwell’s army under the officer, Luke, who has already been mentioned in connection with Samuel Butler.8 He saw it as a sign from Heaven when a fellow soldier was sent to the front in his place, and was mortally wounded. He married in 1658 and fathered four children. He turned to preaching on the advice of John Gifford of Bedford, the animator of a Baptist cell.9 He 6 7 8 9

According to Tindall 1934, 57, 66, this was an act of benevolent reparation, after Bunyan had earlier denied women access to ministerial functions, and written of ‘the shame of their sex’. The Puritan considered this ‘the devil’s pastime’ (Harrison 1928, 169). § 62.2. For an idea of the atmosphere of this Bedford cell, see the opening in Lantern Yard in George Eliot’s Silas Marner (Volume 5, § 194.2). In the little Presbyterian community, daily life revolved around discussions about justification, conversion, and participation in the society of saints, while some persons were indicated as unequivocally damned. One proof of damnation was theft, especially of sacred objects and alms, as recounted in Mr Badman, the very crime of which Silas Marner is accused.

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became a tireless Puritan preacher, and was imprisoned, as has been said, for twelve years. He died of a fever when he returned home soaked to the skin after trying to heal a quarrel between a father and his son. Such is, in summary, Bunyan’s life story as recounted in Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, written in 1666, the second most important of Bunyan’s four main works. His entire production numbers about sixty titles, including various polemical texts and diatribes. Grace Abounding professes to be a neutral, unpolished narration, exemplifying the paradigmatic journey10 of justification through grace. After a foreword, the text is divided into short numbered sections that form a spasmodic diary of morbid introspection, intended to illustrate the continuous uncertainty of the outcome of the fight between God and the devil for possession of the soul of each of us. The single entries of this diary are all very much the same – nightly torments, frightening visions, and diabolical attacks that manifest themselves in an unending series of temptations. However, merciful God never abandons his creature and extends his helping hand just as the sinner is about to fall again. This is not just an account of events, but a chronicle of never-ending crises and suffering, a great tug-of-war between good and evil. For many years Bunyan had in fact been engaged in a daily interrogation about his own situation: was he, or not, one of the ‘saints’? The crucially important sections 58–9 make it clear that it is, unfortunately, God, in his inscrutability, who chooses, not man. Just as important is the doubt whether the choice has already been made, with all of the relapses into vice, disbelief, and apathy. Crises are overcome, but the destination is by definition unattainable: the divine calling must be perceived by the sinner every day. In any case, Bunyan repeats the basic concept of Puritan Calvinism: ‘man is saved through the blood of Christ’. Once again, at the end of reflection 207, Bunyan confesses that he is wavering: ‘so my soul did hang as in a pair of scales again, sometimes up, and sometimes down; now in peace, and anon again in terror’. The spiritual autobiography goes as far as the 10

Tindall 1934, 22–41, provides a detailed comparison between Grace Abounding and numerous other biographies of Calvinist ‘enthusiasts’ of the time, not only in order to highlight the existence of a traditional subgenre, but also to show Bunyan’s superiority as an artist.

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beginning of his activity as a preacher and the discovery of his divine gift for expounding the word of God. Some short additions contain a self-defence against several accusations, mainly fornication, an account of his time in gaol, and the details of the trial that led to his conviction in 1660. They show Bunyan’s firm intention not to abscond, nor to come to some kind of agreement with the authorities. He chose, instead, to keep faith with his community of believers. There is also a transcript of the interrogation that led to his conviction, with the reasons against liturgical practice and Laud’s Book of Common Prayer, in yet another unjust trial of an innocent man, accused of sedition by means of preaching. 2. One of two works written after Pilgrim’s Progress, The Life and Death of Mr Badman (1680) describes a journey in the opposite direction to that of Christian, with the eponymous hero dying unrepented in order to demonstrate the necessity for justification, and the inexorability of divine punishment for sinners. The text is also, albeit inconspicuously, a new experiment in narrative technique: an imaginary, and therefore allegorical, biography, recounted in the form of a dialogue between two personified abstract entities, one wise and knowledgeable, the other ‘attentive’, the adulating companion whose role it is to ask questions and feed the discussion. It is tempting to see here a distant resemblance to the nineteenth-century ‘imaginary conversation’. However that may be, it is yet another proof of Bunyan’s capacity for satire on top of the homiletic intention. One thinks of the Elizabethan Renaissance dialogue, for example Ascham’s Toxophilus. The story of Badman soon fades into the background, both because it is a straightforward account, and because it makes one look back with nostalgia to the sharpness and vividness of the dream of Pilgrim’s Progress. A cold, academic dissertation takes place between the two lofty, distant speakers, expressed in a series of carefully numbered distinctions. Badman is none other than an image of Restoration society – corrupt, sinful, and deaf to religion. The narrative is often interrupted to give way to illustrative anecdotes. The mania for quoting from Scripture becomes tiresome, and Badman becomes almost a Burtonian treatise. Theologically, it is again centred on divine predestination and on the debatable presumption of the justified – or those who believe themselves to be justified – to have foreknowledge of divine judgement. Badman’s damnation has been irreversible

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from the beginning, from his childhood and his early tendency to lie, to steal, blaspheme, and mock everything sacred. Thanks to his hypocritical pretence of religion, he has had a good woman as a wife. Now a widower, he continues to ignore various signs sent by God that might enable him to escape punishment. He is condemned to death by his two interlocutors, who know what is in God’s mind. The Holy War11 (1682) is another Manichaean contest, and, at the same time, a measure of the impact of Milton’s two epics, of which Bunyan paraphrases the same spiritual journey. Shaddai and Diabolus argue over the possession of the principality of Mansoul (the first of a series of personifications). The son who leads the reinforcements, and engages battle with Diabolus, is Emmanuel. The final victory of the forces of good is delayed owing to the ontological uncertainty of the Puritans (and therefore of Bunyan himself ) concerning the result of the war in the human soul. On an aesthetic plane, the outcome is a long, drawn-out text and a certain artificiality. § 71. Early feminism The birth of literary feminism, or women’s writing, almost ipso facto feminist, is controversial, but experts generally place it in the second half of the seventeenth century and point to two or three ‘mothers’, heralded to some degree by Katherine Philips and Margaret Cavendish and, earlier, by three or four women poets and playwrights of the Elizabethan age.1 Unaware of each other’s existence, separated by a generation gap and geographical distance, they nonetheless created a coordinated movement and an interconnected, though diversified, phenomenology of literary genres, and, above all, of varying dialectical positions. These early experiments were followed by scores of others in the course of the eighteenth century. This constitutes the pioneer stage of literary feminism. From the beginning of the nineteenth century on, the number of female authors grows enormously. A short article by Virginia Woolf2 on the letters of Dorothy 11

Memories of the Civil War are mixed with oblique references to political facts and a hidden allegorical message.

1 2

§ 40.2 for the first two, and Volume 1, § 36.6 n. 5 for the others. The essay is ‘Dorothy Osborne’s “Letters”’, in TCR, Second Series, 59–66.

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Osborne (1627–1695) to her future husband, the diplomat, William Temple, is still fundamental reading if one wishes to understand the origins of the phenomenon, as explained by a distant descendant. First of all, it is significant that Virginia Woolf regrets the fact that Osborne’s marriage to Temple not only brought to an end a blissful suspension of time, but also deprives the reader of other letters to add to the mere seventy-seven that the two wrote during their courtship. Thanks to the inexorable passing of time, the young Swift, just appointed secretary to Temple, described the now elderly Dorothy as ‘wise’, ‘gentle’, and ‘placid’, ignorant of the fiery, independent temperament that characterized her when she was young. Formulating a shrewd paradox, Woolf says that it was a pity the marriage was only frowned upon by Dorothy’s royalist parents, and not actually prevented; first, because once married, the two had no need to write to each other, and therefore the correspondence ceased; second, because Dorothy had secret misgivings about married life, and remembered ‘failure after failure’. As is well known, Virginia Woolf often puts a particular spin on the subjects she writes about as a literary critic, impartiality being vitiated in a way by empathy. Thus her treatment of Dorothy Osborne is no different: she is presented as essentially melancholy, splenetic, depressed, unbalanced; a moody woman in whom irony becomes sarcasm and negative existentialism – in short, all the well-known Woolfian traits, so that Dorothy turns into a distant anticipation of Mrs Ramsay: children, home, duties, disasters, right up to the terrifying prophecy of the son who ‘filled his boots with stones and leapt into the Thames’.3 In the context of literary history, a ­preamble in Woolf ’s essay indicates how and in what circumstances women’s writing began, claiming Dorothy Osborne as the founder. Had she been born in 1527 she would have written nothing; if she had been born in 1827 she would have written novels. As it happened, she was born in 1627, and wrote letters. She overcame social prejudices, though some traces remain, and wrote because of an irrepressible need to express her inner self. So, these are not formal vehicles of information, but invitations to the reader to enter her secret world, and take a seat.

3

Cf. Volume 7, § 159.3 and n. 54 for the contextualization of this detail.

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2. After Dorothy Osborne, in the chain of seventeenth-century women authors come two apparently different writers, whose works converge on two discursive modes that might be called practice and theory, or metaphor and literality, or even just two antithetical registers of the same literary genre. Going by the year of birth, Aphra Behn (?1640–1689) could have been Mary Astell’s grandmother; the two are joined by a secret, experimented inclination towards Catholic spiritualism (in one case, this leaning was always ambiguous, and ultimately, denied). Both were also convinced Tories. All the rest would be just a series of disagreements, were it not that Behn might well have supported Astell’s ideology e contrario, like a consummate, sibylline turncoat, forced to make shift by the demands of the sex market and current prejudice. However, I have to conclude that this hypothesis leaves much to be desired. Most readers know of Virginia Woolf ’s lapidary, unequivocal, and probably over-romantic investiture of Aphra Behn: it was scandalous, she said, but appropriate that Behn should be buried in Westminster Abbey. Woolf tacitly removes from Osborne the title of founding mother of feminist writing, and hands it to Aphra Behn. She was the first professional writer, unique at the end of the seventeenth century. She broke through the barriers of gender, wishing to be, and be judged as, a playwright, not a female writer. She was prodigiously prolific and energetic, and in a mere twenty years wrote as many successful, long-running plays. She also made her mark in poetry, and, especially, the novel, or long short story: her Love Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister4 (1684–1687) and, particularly, Oroonoko, are evident forerunners, more than fifty years in advance, of Richardson, Defoe and Swift. Using stratagems that smack of the Jesuits at the time of Elizabeth, Behn draws a dividing line between her public role, as a professional writer, and her privacy, which she jealously protects in the highly dangerous period in which she lived. It is not certain what her birth surname was: it may have been Johnson. Her father was a barber. She may have been born in Kent, and a Catholic. That she was a Tory is shown by her support for the Stuarts and the considerable number of her Tory friends. That she was part of the circle of friends of Rochester (as proved 4

A three-volume epistolary novel that tells of les liaisons dangereuses of the English aristocracy at the time of the Exclusion crisis.

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by her elegy for him) tells us little of her convictions, bearing in mind that Rochester too was not exempt from sudden, contradictory bursts of faith and repentance.5 Another version was however circulated: that, in 1663, Aphra accompanied her father to Suriname, then an English possession,6 of which he had been appointed governor. The detailed descriptions of flora and fauna, as well as language, that provide the background to Oroonoko (supposed to derive from the first-hand account of a slaver) are so vivid and clear as to suggest a personal knowledge of the tropics. Others have denied she ever went near the places described, and claim that the story comes from a travel book that had just been published.7 If indeed she did visit Suriname, it was on her return that she married a certain Behn, a Dutch or German merchant, only to separate almost immediately. Another possibility is that the husband, older than her, may have died soon after. The fact remains that she was always known by her married name. The daring temperament of this fearless adventurer, as well as a good deal of duplicity, is shown by the fact that, although an acknowledged supporter of the Stuarts, she fell in love with the son of a regicide, and agreed to become a spy in Antwerp – using the eloquent code name of Astrea – in order to obtain the king’s pardon in exchange for information on the Dutch. At the end of her mission, she was not paid and was imprisoned for debt. She was a precocious and expeditious writer, beginning her career in 1670 when she was thirty, and dying at just forty-nine. In her nineteen years of writing, her production was only slightly less than Dryden’s, not counting her non-dramatic works.8 Readers today are still intrigued by her contradictions: everything 5

6 7 8

§ 61. ‘The Disappointment’, first published in a collection by Rochester himself, uses ten-line stanzas, and numerous erotic periphrases and double-entendres, to tell the story of Lysander’s impotent desire for the willing and eager Chloris during a love tryst in a wood. Of course, the exchange of this colony for New Amsterdam, later, New York, agreed in 1667 between the Dutch and the English, altered the whole course of world history. AEN, 35. Recent studies support the hypothesis that Behn did actually spend some time in South America. The most recent edition of the complete works is edited by J. Todd, 7 vols, London 1992–1996, which takes its place alongside the excellent standard edition edited by M. Summers, 6 vols, London 1915.

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would suggest that there was no real adherence to, but no disagreement with, the style of a certain kind of titillating Baroque theatre popular on the Continent: a discordia concors or juxtaposition of saintly chastity set against extreme sensuality, with the inevitable nuns contemplating a farewell to sex before taking the veil. Behn takes and exploits the trappings of this theatre. Anything for a hit. It is also possible to separate the woman from the professional playwright, who was interested only in the stage success of her plays, and was not above using popular subjects and stylistic stratagems only to abandon them when she saw audiences had had their fill, and move on to more profitable genres. Whatever she wrote was conditioned by the need to make a living.9 If we were to draw ideological conclusions, we would have to say that the world depicted by Behn is irredeemable. Everything is rotten, and sexual disgust has never been so ‘misandric’. Behn’s overriding theme is the same old sexual desire of Elizabethan, and especially Middletonian memory, expressed in the well-worn, repetitive formulas (often plagiarized) typical of the theatre of intrigue. In her first play (1670), a woman has no choice but to be unfaithful, as she is the victim of a ‘forc’d marriage’, as the title reveals. In her most successful play, The Rover10 (1677), set in Naples during Carnival, a feisty Hellena holds her own in a series of dialectical challenges with the libertine hero. However, this is just the main track of a quadriphonic plot. In The Lucky Chance (1686), wives betray their husbands with more justification than their abject mates. In other plays, the ubiquitous fop forms the lynch-pin of satirical farce. Oroonoko, believed to have been published in about 1678 and revised in 1688, is a Marvellian utopia on original innocence,11 which provided ammunition for the anti-slavery movement, until the deplorable trade and practice was abolished after 150 9 10 11

As claimed by SEL, 137. The commercial success of this book led to a sequel in 1681. I, for one, can perceive in this work themes, figures and moods that are reminiscent of Webster’s rather dark comedy, The Devil’s Law Case (Volume 1, § 127). Rather like Othello, Oroonoko is a Moorish warrior, highly educated and civilized, strikingly handsome and deeply honourable, but pathologically jealous of his Desdemona, in this case, Imoinda. So here, in the first section (the African part of the story), we have one of the extremes of the discordia I have mentioned in relation to Behn. Oroonoko kills Imoinda, who accepts her death, to avoid her being raped

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years of impassioned debate. Posthumous publications include a novella in the style of Oroonoko, another London comedy, and a few short stories, perhaps apocryphal, which exploited her fame, as in the case of Shakespeare fifty years earlier. 3. Mary Astell (1666–1731) is apparently the exact opposite of Behn. Born in Newcastle, of middle-class parents, she moved to London when she was about twenty. She had no formal education, apart from what was given her by an uncle, a priest, who cultivated her unusually speculative talent and intellectual curiosity. Her leanings may be guessed from the fact that she was in the good graces of Archbishop Sancroft, and was encouraged to write and helped to publish in the circles of the most sanctimonious blue-stockings of London. Not only did Astell never marry: she never ventured into the field of creative writing. However, she conducted a theoretical, rather than practical, investigation into the same problems as were presented in dramatic and paradoxical form by Aphra Behn. Her first publication, in 1694, was a serious, and far from ‘modest’, proposal to ladies, consisting of the institution of a ‘monastery’, funded by wealthy spinsters, where women might study. Three years later, a curriculum was added. In a set of ‘reflections’ (1700), women were advised to use great caution in choosing a husband, and to refuse enforced marriage, just as in Behn’s play. As a philosopher, she took on Locke himself with a weighty theological-philosophical treatise (1705) based on the criticism of tolerance for Dissenters. Astell constitutes early proof that feminism does not develop smoothly and uniformly in time. It was to prove difficult to reconcile Astell’s bland conservatism with later feminist instances, usually much more radical and ‘revolutionary’. Astell preceded Edgeworth and her pedagogic writings informed by similar moderation;12 the idea of a female academy was to be inserted in Johnson’s Rasselas, and echoes of it are to be found in Tennyson’s The Princess. Nearer to her in time, Defoe approved of her agenda of extending to women the access to education. With just

12

by the English after the failure of the revolt he has organized and led. He then commits suicide. § 166.2.

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a touch of imagination, it was said that both Pope and Richardson were inspired by her, the latter using her as the model for Clarissa. 4. In the early eighteenth century, the female literary canon was already rich and varied in its diametric opposition to male writing. Dissonance was the battle cry. Yet, from a wide variety of backgrounds and intellectual formation, women writers converge on some common objectives and aspirations, while continuing to differ over others. Extreme positions are represented by laicism, irreverent and libertine agnosticism described by the adjective ‘lurid’, High-Church Anglicanism, and Roman Catholicism, right up to transcendental spiritualism. The women involved are married or single, sometimes from London, but more often from the counties – south, Midlands and north. Some are even from Ireland. Unlike Behn, they are tenacious journalists, who collaborate enthusiastically with various newspapers and journals, and take care to collect their work in complete editions so as to hand down their message to posterity. For all this, in many cases they remain shadowy figures owing to a scarcity of biographical data. So the writers I intend to briefly discuss – omitting others13 – are women who were known and renowned in their lifetime, but subsequently have been forgotten, or have become just names in a list. Today they have emerged from obscurity, have been reprinted and translated into various languages, 13

Not exactly a feminist, but a parodist is Charlotte Lennox (1720–1804). The daughter of an English army officer stationed in New York, she returned to England and tried to make a career as an actress, but with scant success. She turned to the novel precisely halfway through the century. She was praised by Fielding and Johnson for The Female Quixote (1752), but her few other novels and plays aroused no great interest or enthusiasm. One of her merits was a groundbreaking concordance of Shakespeare’s sources. The Female Quixote, too, based on the French translations of the Spanish original by Scudéry and La Calprenède, can be seen as a precursor of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. Arabella, brought up in a manor, believes she is living in the world of romance, a genre of reading she has been addicted to since childhood. Because she lives mostly in her own imaginary world, there is continuous friction between her and the other characters, like the maidservant, Lucy, who are all very down-to-earth. In a picaresque sequel, Arabella sets off on a journey with a female Sancho Panza, and heads for Bath and London, where the two are involved in a number of grotesquely comic situations. The happy ending comes too soon: Arabella recovers and marries her patient, down-to-earth cousin.

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and form an essential part, not only of the history of women’s writing, but of popular, commercial literature. This ‘archaeological’ operation has led, in some cases, to the discovery of works of some value, not just in terms of feminism, but for literary history tout court, since many of the works in question broke ground that was later cultivated with great success by male writers. Women were, for instance, the first to explore the potential of the epistolary genre, and, in particular, autobiography, sometimes in a highly sophisticated manner. Aphra Behn, Mrs Delarivier Manley (1663–1724) and Mrs Eliza Haywood (circa 1693–1756) formed a triumvirate of wit, according to a contemporary critic, but only in a literary sense, as the latter two were two generations younger than Behn. The biographical cliché is repeated – an adventurous life, defiance of the demands of respectability, and the absolute imperative of the chosen career. Manley, who debuted with epistolary novels full of female outpourings, shocked the reading public with her The New Atlantis (1709),14 in which she attacked, using pseudonyms, many important figures of the Whig establishment, above all Marlborough, Winston Churchill’s forebear, who responded with words of fire. Her principal work is, however, the memoir, The Adventures of Rivella (1714). Here Manley, clearly identifiable behind the anagrammed name, divides herself into two antithetical masks. A prolific writer, she also tried her hand at play writing, and in 1711 took Swift’s place as editor of The Examiner (Swift expressed his approval of her in several letters), an example, unusual for the time, of equal rights for men and women. Eliza Haywood was a failed actress, much maligned because of her love affairs, from which two illegitimate children were born, the unflinching target of Pope’s lethal but carefully phrased jibes in the Dunciad, and the mockery of Fielding. She had begun her career as the author of novellas based on the erotic jousting of the beau monde. She also wrote novels that display an unusually deep psychological portrayal of characters, stories of heroines seduced and abandoned by libertines, who join forces in what is an embryonic form of the nineteenth-century community of women without men. A playwright, on and off, up to 1737, founder and editor of a women’s

14

Pope, too, makes a scornful reference to this work in The Rape of the Lock, III, l. 165.

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journal, she was also the belatedly contrite author of The History of Miss Betty Thoughtless (1751), one of the first models of the growing up of an ingenuous adolescent and her attainment of bourgeois decorum. 5. Penelope Aubin (ca 1679-ca 1738), Jane Barker (1652–1732), Mary Davys (ca 1674–1732) and Elizabeth Singer Rowe (1674–1737) represent other versions, nuances and feminist strains that have been released from the sub-literary confines to which they have been relegated until recently. Aubin, the wife of a merchant and mother of his children, wrote seven novels and several books of poetry marked by a subdued, pious feminism – as predicted by her Christian name – which is not dissimilar to that of Mary Astell. Jane Barker followed James II in exile to France. When she returned to England she wrote political verse, and lines in favour of women’s education and the unmarried life. Like Astell, she never married, but, unlike her, was no crypto-Catholic, but a true convert to the Church of Rome. We know that Mary Davys grew up in Dublin, but little else of her adolescence and early life. By 1700 she had been a wife and was now a widow. She moved to London, where she set to writing didactic, moralizing plays, though with a good deal of Irish humour and some outright comedy, aimed at warning women against contracting marriages of convenience. Relying only on her own resources, she tried to make her fortune, and became the owner of a coffee-house in Cambridge. Abandoning drama, she wrote at least two forward-looking novels, one with an eloquent title and a ‘reformed coquette’ as the heroine (1724) – almost like Haywood’s greatest novel, but from a much more patriarchal point of view – and a second one, inevitably in the form of letters, satirizing the aristocracy in a manner reminiscent of Richardson. The portrait of an ‘accomplished rake’ (1727) was drawn by Davys without reticence, and was completely misunderstood, taken for a defence of libertinism rather than a condemnation of it. The daughter of Dissenters, brought up to serve religion and her fellow man, Elizabeth Rowe, though no great beauty,15 had, however, many suitors, among whom the writer of hymns, Watts, and the poet, Prior. She chose, instead of one of them, a poet thirteen years younger than herself. Lady

15

But see BAUGH, vol. III, 907.

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Winchilsea, who met her, gave the name of Philomela to this author of religious poetry, devoted and slightly lugubrious, who began writing at the age of twelve and collected her work in a volume in 1728 with the telling title of ‘friendship in death, in twenty letters from the dead to the living’. Her work contains also a vein of suffering and protest against the indelicacies of males. In 1736 she wrote a biblical poem in eight books based on Milton. Elizabeth Rowe, like Mary Astell, and more than her, was hailed as an icon of wifely saintliness, and admired for her femininity, subdued, but firm and lucid, for nearly 200 years, up to the end of the nineteenth century, when she was shunted into oblivion.

Part III 

The Augustan Age

§ 72. England from the Glorious Revolution to 1745 In the past fifty years, historians have gradually modified the conventional image of eighteenth-century England thanks to an ever-increasing apparatus of parameters, indicators and statistics. What emerges from all this is the picture of a dynamic society, more conflictual and less static than that handed down to us by the standard pro-Whig versions. Take, for example, the almost iconoclastic incipit of that classic textbook, England in the Eighteenth Century,1 by J. H. Plumb: ‘The first noticeable thing about [English] towns would have been the stench’. He goes on to describe the terribly unhygienic conditions in which the poor were forced to live. Behind the celebrated Augustan splendour, which represented a supposedly perfect fusion of culture and society, were pockets of poverty, illiteracy, early death, and low wages caused by enclosures, with, as a result, a deepening rift between the two nations of the rich and the poor. In this light, it is to be doubted whether the period from 1688 to 1745 did in fact mark the advent of an affluent society that was to last, without interruption, indeed in crescendo, right up until after the Second World War, a total of 250 years. This is true according to some parameters, but not others. England does take on in this period the role of principal European military and colonial power, and is the home to the Industrial Revolution, thanks to technological innovations, the division of labour, primacy in coal, steel and textiles, and improvements in transport. At the beginning of the century, the economy was still agricultural, and members of Parliament came from the landed gentry. However, trade was flourishing. The expression ‘cash nexus’ is coined to indicate a tendency towards brute monetization backed by the alibi that luxury and waste produce wealth – as we shall see in Mandeville – while alms-giving encourages laziness and malingering. The business class grew, the rising bourgeoisie married into titles and built themselves huge mansions complete with libraries and art collections. The Bank of England was founded in order to raise money to finance William of Orange’s wars. It later extended its lending to private customers by means of paper money that could be exchanged for gold. The newly formed Commercial Companies

1

PLU, 12.

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were given royal approval to establish English monopolies in parts of the world like Russia and India, without excluding individual freelance merchants, but favouring the development of a conflict between protectionists and ‘free-traders’. Unimaginable wealth in the form of gold and precious stones was discovered in India. The resulting rise in standards of living led to a corresponding increase in leisure. In this embryonic consumer society, the middle classes discovered a taste for gambling, cock-fighting, hunting and horse-racing. Snuff became fashionable, as did wigs. Noblemen carried swords or daggers at their sides, and quarrels involving honour were resolved by duels. High society moved in mass to the various spa towns of England, and in Bath Beau Nash laid down the rules of etiquette. 2. The beginning of the eighteenth century saw the confirmation of the supremacy of the House of Commons. The two-party system of parliamentary democracy was born, and government was headed by a cabinet of ministers. Franchise was still limited, however, even though the population had reached more than ten million, and literacy, especially among women, had grown. After a close-run race that ended in victory in 1714,2 confirmed in 1721, Walpole established a Whig supremacy that was to last for twenty years in what was practically a one-party regime, the only opposition being represented by Bolingbroke and the so-called ‘patriots’, who opposed the government and considered themselves to be beacons of liberty. Walpole’s system of patronage consisted in handing out wellpaid sinecures in exchange for political support (these posts were often ‘sold on’). This state of affairs led to a long-standing and bitter war waged by Pope and Swift against ‘dunces’, that is poets, and writers in general, elevated to prestigious positions not through merit but as a recognition of their ‘flexibility’. Walpole instituted an embryonic form of government by inner cabinet, at the head of which sat the Prime Minister, a term which 2

In 1714, Marlborough and the Whigs attempted to reward the Dissenters, who had provided economic support for the war against France and Spain, by repealing the law of religious discrimination, but Queen Anne was adamant in her opposition and dissolved the Whig government. The Tories were invited to form a new administration. A drawn-out disagreement between Harley and Bolingbroke was the cause of the Whigs’ return to power after the death of the queen.

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started off as a kind of nickname. All of a sudden, after 100 years of fierce religious conflict, the Toleration Act of 1689 cleared the board of sectarian bickering, and opened the way to greater tolerance (which did not, however, include Catholics or Jews). Agnostics increased in number, and deism was born. The Church itself seemed to take an economic approach to spiritual matters, and Bishop Tillotson claimed that if the same criteria are applied to faith as are used in trade, then eternal life is guaranteed. The eighteenth-century Church of England, often seen as distant, and deaf to the problems of the masses, contributed not a little to the rise of Methodism. 3. In his ‘Life’ of Addison, Dr Johnson says of William of Orange: ‘His study was only war’. Formally, there were two claimants to the throne of England, the ‘Old Pretender’, followed by the ‘Young’ one; that is to say, the son and the grandson of James II. The Young Pretender was the ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ beloved of the Scots, whose last attempt to take back the throne in 1745 provides the historical setting for Walter Scott’s novel, Waverley. Queen Anne, William’s sister-in-law, came to the throne in 1702, and reigned until her death in 1714. Despite her seventeen pregnancies, she bore no children. She is famous for her morbid relationships with a number of women (two in particular: the Duchess of Marlborough, to whom she wrote letters using a pseudonym, and Abigail Hill, later Lady Masham). Her model was Elizabeth, and she, like her Tudor predecessor, was believed to have the power to heal those affected by ‘the king’s evil’, or scrofula (Dr Johnson was, when still a child, ‘touched’ by the royal hand). She was, however, but a faint copy of the Virgin Queen: tiny, slow-moving, often crippled by gout, she altogether lacked Elizabeth’s charisma. Still, she did succeed in bringing an end to the War of Spanish Succession, with almost triumphal results. Hostilities had broken out in 1702 in an attempt to stop France from occupying the vacant Spanish throne, or making Spain a vassal state. England aimed at re-organizing and reducing the Spanish empire by dividing it. So, it had to form an alliance with Austria. At the same time, it aimed at preventing a Franco-Spanish move to close international markets, including South America, to English wool and textiles. Commercial England rejoiced at the victorious conclusion of the war in 1713, sealed by the Treaty of Utrecht. The war, fought for the first time on the fields of Europe, was won thanks to the famous campaigns of the Duke

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of Marlborough. The Treaty of Utrecht, where peace was underwritten with the help of the poet, Prior, can be seen as a trial run of the Congress of Vienna and that of Versailles, 100 and 200 years later respectively. A truly historic event in English political history, it awarded to England Gibraltar and Port Mahon in Minorca, which became two strategic bases for the control of the Mediterranean. England was also given Newfoundland and Hudson Bay, as well as permission to export slave labour for the cotton plantations of her American colonies. The Treaty stated that the slaves were to be transported in a single ship only once a year, but soon the ship became a whole fleet. At the same time, England launched its long-term policy, conducted on a diplomatic plane, of dividing the great continental powers; it was quick to sniff out possible Franco-Spanish alliances, and in controversies, always took the side of the underdog in order to scotch the formation of large blocs. As usual, the only thorns in its side were Ireland, where the situation had worsened in 1690, and Scotland, formally subjugated by the Act of Union of May 1707, but in reality the scene of fighting between Presbyterian Covenanters and pro-Catholic supporters of the Stuarts, known as Jacobites. France was bound by the Treaty to deny asylum to the Pretenders. Only the Dutch were dissatisfied, claiming they had not been rewarded enough. 4. In 1714 the Tories embraced Jacobitism, and the Whigs were in favour of the Protestant succession and the Hanovers. The general election of that year produced a surge of Whig members, marking the end of the Whig-Tory coalition. After that, elections were held every seven, rather than every three years. When Anne died, without issue, the country might well have found itself in a similar dilemma to the one that was created at the death of James I, and, indirectly, Charles I. Parliament ordered the imprisonment of Harley and the banishment of Bolingbroke, and welcomed George I,3 whose absenteeism and lack of familiarity with things English favoured the executive system of a Cabinet headed by a Prime Minister. With this, the sovereign assumed a secondary role, and was represented before Parliament by the Prime Minister. Walpole knew that the Hanover 3

When the Hanover dynasty was declared eligible to the English throne, several bishops, called ‘non-jurors’, remained faithful to the Stuarts.

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dynasty was as yet fragile; his prime concern was to play for time, keep the peace, reduce hostility between the parties, and anaesthetize the country. First of all he tackled the war debt, which amounted to fifty-four million pounds sterling, with astronomical rates of interest that were pushing the economy to the very edge of bankruptcy. Obviously, his foreign policy was based on non-aggression, so as not to increase the national debt. To this end, he eliminated his rival, Stanhope, who was calling for the resumption of the war against France, and adversaries from other areas of the Whig party, like Sunderland and Carteret,4 thus giving rise to a centralized administration of which he was the undisputed leader. He also saw to it that seven bishoprics went to trusted favourites, in this way guaranteeing his control over the Church. The economy was protected by tariffs and trade laws, although a bill to introduce a tax on the sale of tobacco and wine (rather than taxing them at the port of arrival to discourage smuggling) was shouted down by the representatives of the world of trade. When George I died in 1727, Walpole stayed on as Prime Minister of Queen Caroline, who stood in for her otherwise-engaged husband, George II. However, war with Spain became inevitable when Spanish interference, deemed intolerable, in English commercial shipping in the Pacific aroused the sleeping dog of nationalism. The resulting war was waged in an almost lackadaisical manner. Opposition to Walpole was expressed by the weekly, The Craftsman, as well as by dissenting voices within his own party. Walpole fell in 1742 when he refused to approve of a war (of Polish succession) invoked to increase English prestige and wealth, the very reasons that led Pitt the Elder, also known as Chatham, to support it. Walpole resigned in 1742, and died in the watershed year of 1745. § 73. The Enlightenment in England In 1745, the ‘Young Pretender’, Charles Edward, or ‘Le Chevalier’, landed in Scotland and made his way south to Derby. The population was unreactive, and a small contingent of troops recalled from the FrancoEnglish-Prussian-Austrian war was sufficient to make him turn on his heels

4

The low-quality coins he turned out in Ireland led to Swift’s pamphlet (§ 91.3).

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and flee to France. That same year, the halfway point of George II’s reign, constitutes a historical and ideological caesura: all uncertainty, all suspense concerning the ruling dynasty disappeared with the eclipse of the Stuarts from the scene; in literature, the Augustan Age proper came to an end, and the later eighteenth century dawned, a period similar and yet different to the age of Defoe, Swift and Pope. It is a singular coincidence that Swift died in 1745, preceded, a year earlier, by Pope. Inevitably, there is much of continental Illuminism in the English Enlightenment, which sanctions and precedes, seconds and outstrips its European counterpart. It also stands back, as often happens when England is faced with continental cultural phenomena. In Europe, Illuminism spans a whole century, and begins and ends with clear demarcations and overall homogeneous characteristics. The 100 years of its existence present fewer variations than the Renaissance; there are no definite fractures, but instead a gradual escalation. It is unitary and planetary, in that the world of the time was still Eurocentric. The standard historical versions of the movement use an astronomical metaphor: the initial rising of a star is followed by its ‘apogee’. It must be seen how the English Enlightenment stands in relation to a period which is witness to an epistemic revolution resembling, in a way, the Renaissance, with its focus on the here-and-now, dismantling the body-spirit dualism, establishing the primacy of public utility and progress, and, most of all, the objectives of the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, and the removal of all obstacles to this end, such as obscurantist religions, which are to be reformed or abolished. How much of the aforesaid description can be applied to England? The scenario of the English Enlightenment is more fragmented than that of other Illuminisms. The first problem is to determine a time frame and a terminus ad quem. Continuity is broken in England, too, by two events that are, in some way, linked: the French Revolution on a social, political and ideological plane, and, as regards literature, the publication of the Lyrical Ballads. It should be remembered that the French Revolution was a moment of symbolic coagulation for intellectuals, and represented the demise of everything that belonged to the ‘old’ eighteenth century. This caused great alarm in England, however, and many writers foreswore the enthusiasm the Revolution had initially stirred in them. As for the terminus a quo, the age of classicism begins in 1702,

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and is divided into two parts: the first up to 1740–1745, usually called the Augustan age, with reference to classical Rome (the adjective, ‘Augustan’, appears to have been coined by Goldsmith); the other, less unified and more subject to ferments from various directions, occupies the remaining thirtyfive years and is commonly known as the age of Johnson. Within the first period, another subdivision is usually made for the reign of Queen Anne, and, consequently, ends in 1714. ‘Augustan’ should be maintained as the accepted historical term, although it has taken on a different, sometimes quite contrary, meaning: it becomes a word oozing insinuation, irony, paradox. The Augustus referred to is a tyrant, and against him Brutus and Cato, and the republican virtues, are held up as models. Horace and Virgil are still appreciated, but at the same time are viewed with some suspicion as ‘servile court poets’. Cicero is admired. The decline of Rome constitutes a deterrent and a warning, and Rome is therefore overshadowed by Greece in every field, especially as the cradle of liberty. Towards the middle of the century, Graecism or Classicism merge with the neo-Gothic, which corresponds to a revaluation of the Celtic-Germanic-Druidic component of the collective imagination. Orientalism becomes important in Johnson and Beckford and in the first ‘chinoiseries’. From the accounts of travels in the Americas comes the myth of the noble savage, especially the Tahitian, as in Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of Omai. 2. The first part of the eighteenth century has been appropriately named, by some, ‘the age of the coffee-house’. The new beverage became popular thanks to increasing imports of coffee beans from the colonies. At the height of the fashion, there were said to be 500 coffee-houses in London, each with its own clientele. In other words, the court gradually ceased to be the place where culture was produced and consumed. It was in the coffee-houses that newspapers, a completely new status symbol, were born and read. The ex-Puritan middle class, hungry for culture as never before, flocked to these gathering places, and created the art of polite conversation and the civilized exchange of the ideas they had read of in the journals to be found in the coffee-house. From Pope onwards, innumerable writers, both great and mediocre, dabbled in journalism, many becoming entrepreneurs and publishers. This practice continued into the Romantic period: Shelley was drowned in 1822 during his return from visiting Byron

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and Leigh Hunt to discuss starting up a new journal, called The Liberal. The first steps were taken by Henry Muddiman around 1650, and by Roger L’Estrange, a supporter of Charles II, and, as such, in disgrace after 1688. The various journals that sprang up overnight throughout the century – published daily or at irregular intervals – at first used the form of the dialogue. Defoe did away with this, and turned journals into an unequivocal vehicle for opinions and ideas: in other words, a political and ideological medium. Two currents or schools of thought emerged expressing different ideas of culture: on one hand, a conservative circle harking back to old values (the renowned querelle between the ancients and the moderns), with, as its leading representatives, Swift, Pope and Gay; on the other, the progressive philosophy of Whigs like Addison, who viewed with interest and approval the steps taken by contemporary science. Rivals were brutally ostracized before being eliminated; the struggle to impose a cultural authority and caste was disguised as a war against amateurism and pedantry, the general climate being aptly encapsulated in the frequently used metaphor of the apocalyptic destruction of all values in a new Noah’s Flood. 3. Writers after 1660 had been only too quick to embrace the licentiousness that the new king had brought from France; they gave further proof of Polonius-like malleability and lack of moral backbone when they enthusiastically donned the preacher’s robes following Jeremy Collier’s invectives against the theatre, and the exhortations of Queens Mary and Anne to put them into practice. The court commanded and writers obeyed. The target of authors was, in the main, the newly enriched middle class, of Puritan extraction, but now bereft of Puritan belief. The job of the man of letters was to provide a forma mentis – in other words, taste, refined manners, and codes of behaviour. It was the same middle class as had been harangued by preachers for the past 100 or so years. A surrogate for the sermon was needed, and was found in the newly established press in its various forms of dailies, periodicals or essays published in journals, a variant, indirect, to be sure, but increasingly more direct, of the plaintive, edifying theatre play. A case in point is Steele, who started out as a playwright and ended up an essayist. Society was split: on one side there was a dissolute aristocracy; on the other, the cautious, canny merchant class. The beginning of the century had seen a cultural revolution resembling, in its general outline, the

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post-1832 upheaval. The petite bourgeoisie was getting bigger and becoming literate, opening a whole new market for publishers. It was a social class with more leisure, and consequently needed reading material that was both edifying and pleasing. Books became a source of income, and publishers and printers were quick to take advantage of the new situation. One natural repercussion was the change in the make-up of the authorial class, until then largely made up of members of the aristocracy. Now they were joined by recruits from the middle classes. The Augustan poet renews and deepens the modern malaise of the artist: strange, hitherto unknown sicknesses become familiar companions of men of letters. One of such medical conditions was hypochondria, which afflicted, among others, James Thomson, Dr Johnson, Boswell (who wrote a series of essays under the pseudonym ‘The Hypochondriack’), and Gray. The Renaissance, of course, had had its melancholics, but now the pathology was more clearly understood and described. The lowest stratum of the authorial class was that of the ‘scribblers’, usually expressed by the term ‘Grub Street’. The lowering of literary standards was attacked by Pope, Swift, Gay, and the Scriblerians. Some were self-taught poets, like Stephen Duck, the wool carder. The year 1750 sees, not the birth, but the emancipation of ‘bluestockings’, and the spread of women’s clubs, the main activity of which was moral edification.1 In 1780 the first circulating libraries appeared, a phenomenon that is synonymous with the Victorian novel. For all of the above reasons, the face of publishing was changed. Pope was the first to excogitate a new publishing formula; at least, he was the first famous author to use the method of subscription, which entailed the advance payment of the costs of printing by means of advertising by influential friends. The copy bought by the subscriber contained a gratulatory table that included the subscriber’s name, ‘writ large’, in a long list of similar supporters. As a consequence of subscription, publishing laws had to be revised or added to. The rights remained in the hands of the publisher, who paid the author a lump sum. A tax was levied on newspapers, for the benefit of the national exchequer. In 1737

1

There were only one or two proletarian poets; in general the voices of popular culture and religious minorities were silenced.

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the Licensing Act exacerbated existing norms; transgression might lead to imprisonment, as in the case of Defoe or Fielding. Politicians were in the writers’ sights, so the politicians defended themselves. 4. Eighteenth-century English thought, based on sensism, empirical and experimental epistemology, and on the utopian dream of the applicability of science to every field of research, rests on Newton and Locke, and, later, on Berkeley and Hume, influential thinkers whose theories constitute essential reference points in the context of European philosophy. The mirage of exactitude was, however, undermined by residual traces of Aristotelianism, with more than a whiff of metaphysics and superstition, until les philosophes rejected the unshakeable certainty with which Newton had glimpsed, behind and beyond the world of phenomena, the presence of an organizing entity. Diderot and Buffon stated their belief in the spontaneous creation of matter, and speculated, at the same time, on the exact duration of the ‘six days of Creation’, an early manifestation of a theory of evolution. Newton’s cosmos presupposes the existence of order and laws laid down by an intelligent creator. The telescope and the microscope were essential instruments for explorations which led to the classification of exotic flora and fauna. By the middle of the century, the first machine factories were up and working; experiments using electricity were carried out, and Watt gave the world the first steam engine. Chemistry, ceramics, fashion – all flourished in the Enlightenment air; and yet, after a mere halfcentury, this temperate illuminism too began to fade. Locke was the first to formulate the concept that the pleasures of the imagination derive from sense perceptions, and secondary pleasures from the ideas of visible objects. Shaftesbury emphasized the creative capacity of an artistic nature; this was further elaborated by German philosophers, and handed on to Coleridge and the other Romantics. The sublime is not an invention of Burke: an eccentric theory held that ruins and rubble testify to the magnificence of a world that was destroyed by the Fall. Thomas Burnet and John Dennis studied the Alpine landscape in terms that were already Burkean, with an essential contribution by Longinus, who had defined art as the expression of passion. In the field of theology, anti-dogmatism and scepticism were considered compatible with religious belief, and the more extreme positions of Continental Illuminism were tempered in England, although even

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the adherents of orthodoxy were not untouched by encroaching secularization, as evidenced by Defoe. After 1689, a reaction against Restoration libertinism entailed a tightening of moral surveillance, sanctioned and encouraged, as I have said, by the two queens. The resulting religion was coldly formal, with none of the passion of mysticism and Puritan pietism; its main virtue was correctness, and its charity skin-deep. There was also a ‘mathematical’ side to religion, with God as a kind of organizer, which, in turn, gave rise to deism and the denial of the possibility of miracles, especially in the Old Testament.2 The concept of benevolence of Collier and Shaftesbury presupposed a perfect universe and inborn human virtue. Since men are rational animals, common sense must be used to resolve differences of opinion. As an inevitable reaction, and in line with the cyclical nature of history, there followed a pietistic revival, which brought with it schools for the poor, associations in favour of temperance and against public indecency, and the ‘Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge’, destined to have a long and glorious career lasting well into the nineteenth century. Methodism was born in the 1730s with the inspired preaching of Wesley and his disciples in barns and farmyards throughout the land. Well before Wesley, the first Masonic lodge in England was formed, in 1715, its aim being to satisfy the need for mysticism and ritual in an increasingly rationalistic age. Especially after 1750, rather than enthusing about unlimited and uninterrupted progress, the more objective among writers and thinkers perceived and passed on to their readers the signs of incipient decay: the standard of education had fallen; society had all but abandoned religious belief and was dominated by a desire for wealth. Already in 1727, Saussure, an ancestor of the famous twentieth-century linguist, was criticizing the English for their crass chauvinism, even though, at the same time, Europe was in the grip of a mania for all things English. Political thinking leaned 2

English deism was much more tolerant than its continental counterpart, the only exception being the sermons by the theologian, Henry Sacheverell, who, in St Paul’s Cathedral, condemned the principles of revolution, and was tried and suspended a divinis in 1710. However, Puritanism, though beaten in the field, had spread throughout society and had become an essential component of the intellectual and practical life of the nation.

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heavily on Locke’s theory of the Glorious Revolution. Arguing against Filmer, Locke maintained that kingship was not based on divine right, but on a contract with the people, which may be repealed in the event of the violation of any of its clauses. Natural law decrees that each man has the right to own property, and obliges the king to protect it. With Locke, the English monarchy became, and remained, a constitutional mixture of oligarchy, monarchy and democracy.3 The English Parliament was a ‘Gothic’ institution, not unlike the Witenagemot of Anglo-Saxon England, as underlined by the Magna Carta and the Revolution of 1688. Hobbes was to agree with Locke when he posited the idea of the state as sovereign and absolute, but not based on divine right. 5. Sentimental drama aimed at arousing emotion and tears by presenting examples of sublime heroism and lofty ideals. Playwrights were at pains to point out that human beings were, by nature, social animals, and that it was only natural to celebrate universal benevolence, philanthropy and reformism, and to work for the creation of humane prisons, orphanages, and houses for the rehabilitation of prostitutes, as well as to encourage the struggle for the rights of women. However, it was prose, historically the literary medium with the slowest development, that became the principal form of expression in the age of reason, and the style favoured by most writers was clear, rational, middle-of-the-road, and restrained. As in every ‘classical’ period, literary law-makers, such as Swift and Johnson, recommended the embalming of the language used in literature, and the erecting of barriers against infiltrations and deformations. The range of possible subgenres had been growing since the end of the previous century. Diaries were published and sold well; letter-writing had become an art, and therefore a commodity; prose branched out into literary criticism, history, philosophy, economics and journalism (which was to play a large part in the anti-slavery campaign later in the century). Lexicography reached its zenith with Johnson’s Dictionary.4 The essay – a more sophisticated version

3 4

SEC, 71. In the eighteenth century the normalization of spelling was all but complete; capital letters were no longer used erratically, and a distinction was made between round and italic letters.

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of the original newspaper article, and the glory of the age – was rooted in Seneca, with, as its modern founding father, Montaigne. Alongside the better-known diarists, like Pepys and Evelyn, we find Thomas Fuller and his The Holy State (1642), while La Bruyère appeared in English in 1688. Satire and the novel were interconnected, in that they shared the same targets, which were made more likeable and treated with less saeva indignatio by the novelists. Ian Watt, the modern authority on the eighteenth-century novel, informs us that Homer and the epic were not popular, with their codes of violence and brutality, so far from eighteenth-century sensibility. Watt quotes the critic Thomas Blackwell, who stated that the conditions in which the Iliad had been written could not be recreated: there was no hero worship in eighteenth-century England, whereas Homer had at his disposal an audience hungry for heroic tales. Furthermore, the epic was an oral genre, probably sung or intoned, featuring larger-than-life characters and inviting its listeners to identify with unusual or unpleasant figures. At bottom, the epic described facts that clashed with real life. The novel addressed the class which was to become the main component of the country and of the reading public. Plots had to have a credible and verifiable social setting. Its genes are, therefore, mixed: the Elizabethan proto-novels of Nashe and Deloney, Greene’s stories of the London underworld, the ‘characters’ and sketches by writers like Addison and Steele, Bunyan, the ‘biographies’ by Defoe, the various romances written in imitation of the French. Literary aesthetics looked back on a rich history of authors and books, and debated with passion the merits of Shakespeare, Milton and Dryden. It was an aesthetics ‘based on rules’, but not without flexibility; neoclassical but also gradually ‘pre-Romantic’ ever since the ‘discovery’ of the sublime. Its sources were Corneille and Boileau, and, in antiquity, Horace. The key word of the century, ‘nature’, needs to be explained in its many contemporary nuances, some of which are antithetical. For poetry, to follow nature meant to seek order, express energy and search for the ‘simple truth’ regarding life. The fight for naturalness and against pedantry and neo-concettism is at the origin of the revival of satire, which was to become the most important poetic genre for almost fifty years. In burlesque, the concepts of imitation and parody are brought into play. The eighteenth century sees the first cases of inversion of signifier and signified on the prosodic plane: blank verse and the heroic couplet are often used as

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vehicles for inappropriate contents, and metrical forms are chosen which are clearly unsuited to the author’s intention (such as Virgilian tropes or epic devices used to describe the squalor of everyday life). 6. An eighteenth-century classification of non-literary art forms in order of importance would be headed by architecture, followed by painting, which actually sometimes overtakes, or at least equals architecture in artistic value. Sculpture is absent (the only three sculptors of any importance are all non-English); music, too, is largely represented by foreigners, Italian and, mostly, German émigrés. As for the English themselves, they excel in applied and minor arts, like gardening, interior decorating, ceramics, and watchmaking. English architects after Wren, such as Vanbrugh, Gibbs and Burlington, formed a group of Palladians who looked for inspiration to Bernini and Borromini, while tempering the Baroque with the severity, bareness and geometrical delimitation of Vitruvius. Burlington originated the ‘Queen Anne style’ – small, unassuming houses with gardens no longer strictly laid out in the manner of the Dutch school of gardeners, but wilder and more irregular; the interiors featured spacious panels, vases decorated in oriental style, and mahogany furniture. This Palladianism was off-set, after 1750, by the Greek architectural ideal, thanks to the impulse given by archaeological tourism and excavations. In all this, Gothic architecture continued to flourish, and provided inspiration for, to give only one example, Walpole’s Strawberry Hill. In the eighteenth century, England continued to import and adopt continental artists like Kneller, a court painter who specialized in portraits of royalty and the aristocracy. The range of possible pictorial subjects was increased by the picturesque, by the landscapes of Wilson and Gainsborough, and by the social art of Hogarth. Reynolds, who, as theorist and president of the Royal Academy, held an opposing view to that of Lessing – that is, the analogies between the arts in the name of their common appeal to the imagination – interpreted the picturesque as the attention given to marginal figures and scenes, and, in his paintings, expressed a realism which was only very slightly sublimated. The portraitist, George Romney, did not limit his art to kings and courtiers, but ventured into genre painting too. Joseph Wright of Derby is an innovator and finds his subjects even in science laboratories. Hogarth had started out as a painter of historical subjects, but soon bade a polemical farewell to the genre. He

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revolutionizes his art when he turns to the ‘conversation piece’, eschewing poses and catching people intent on their everyday tasks or activities. Above all, he brings about a reduction in scale: it is as if the painter were standing back from his position as a portraitist and were looking at a more crowded, panoramic scene, containing separate but connected panels. These are paintings that, for the first time ever, are meant to be studied under a magnifying glass, with distant strains of the wild phantasmagorias of Hieronymus Bosch. Watchmaking and furniture decoration, these too called ‘Queen Anne’, flourished thanks to the Dutchman, Gibbons. Wedgwood’s china, produced in his factory called Etruria, boasted the work of artists like Flaxman, who imitated on the plates and cups the classical motifs found on artefacts discovered in the excavation of Pompeii, which had just been undertaken. In the field of music, the debate on Italian opera had been raging ever since Handel arrived at the English court in 1710, where it met with the open hostility of a Philistine press. 7. The first assessments of eighteenth-century literature were, obviously, the work of those directly involved: the pre-Romantics distanced themselves from the Augustans, and demanded more room for feeling; iconoclastic Romantics in turn criticized their predecessors, while the early Victorians were already looking back with nostalgia. The later nineteenth century saw the gradual emergence of two historical currents, one, led by Macaulay and Leslie Stephen, propounding the view of the eighteenth century as an age of progress; the other composed of Tory critics. After 1920, it was the turn of Modernism to evaluate the century in question: T. S. Eliot defended Dryden, and Leavis championed Pope, both suggesting a natural affinity of their protégés with the Metaphysicals. Both were followed by the ‘new critics’. After 1980, critical positions overlapped and became so entangled as to be, in the end, undecipherable. The only thing the experts concurred on was the importance of not reducing ‘the century to a stub-end of the Metaphysicals, on the one hand, and, on the other, a prelude to Romanticism’.5 The eighteenth-century sense of order identified by Watt was denied by Rawson, who spoke of an internal disorder within 5

G. Sertoli, in MAR, vol. II, 21.

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the comforting exterior. As happens in every controversy, the eighteenth century has, in the past few years, been the object of theoretical constructions and partisan, arbitrary – at times sectorial – interpretations, like those of Foucault, feminist and gender critics, deconstructionists and others, who have further shattered the compactness of the age and are still at work expanding the traditional literary canon of the period. § 74. Pope* I: A ‘re-maker’ of genius Ben Jonson, John Milton, John Dryden and Alexander Pope (1688– 1744) are separated one from another by a generation, more or less, and have 1

*

The Twickenham Edition of the Poems, ed. J. Butt et al., 11 vols, London 1939–1969; Prose Works, ed. N. Ault and R. Cowler, Oxford 1936 and 1986; Correspondence, ed. G. Sherburn, 5 vols, Oxford 1956; Selected Letters, ed. H. Erskine-Hill, Oxford 2000. A new edition of the poems is in course of publication, ed. V. Rumbold, Harlow 2007–. L. Strachey, Alexander Pope, Cambridge 1925; E. Sitwell, Alexander Pope, London 1930; G. Sherburn, The Early Career of Alexander Pope, Oxford 1934; G. Tillotson, On the Poetry of Pope, Oxford 1938, 1950; M. Praz, La poesia di Pope e le sue origini, Roma 1947 (typewritten university notes, not included in the bibliography in PSL, 329–30; half of the book is on the ‘origins’, but see below, n. 16); B. Dobrée, Alexander Pope, London 1951; R. W. Rogers, The Major Satires of Alexander Pope, Urbana, IL 1955; A. Williams, Pope’s ‘Dunciad’: A Study of Its Meaning, London 1955; R. A. Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion, Oxford 1959; M. Mack, The Garden and the City: Retirement and Politics in the Later Poetry of Pope 1731–1743, Toronto 1969 (reviewed by Praz in SSI, vol. II, 108–12), and Alexander Pope: A Life, New Haven, CT 1985; J. Sitter, The Poetry of Pope’s ‘Dunciad’, Minneapolis, MN 1971; P. M. Spacks, An Argument of Images: The Poetry of Alexander Pope, Cambridge, MA 1971; CRHE, ed. J. Barnard, London 1973; P. Rogers, An Introduction to Pope, London 1975, Essays on Pope, Cambridge 1993, The Alexander Pope Encyclopedia, Westport, CT and London 2004, The Cambridge Companion to Alexander Pope (as editor), Cambridge, MA 2007, and A Political Biography of Alexander Pope, London 2015; G. Galigani, Il ‘Rape of the Lock’ del Pope: quattro voci di un contrappunto, Pisa 1976; M. R. Brownell, Alexander Pope and the Arts of Georgian England, Oxford 1978; G. S. Fraser, Alexander Pope, London 1978; The Art of Alexander Pope, ed. H. ErskineHill and A. Smith, London 1979; D. B. Morris, Alexander Pope: The Genius of Sense, Cambridge, MA 1984; L. Brown, Alexander Pope, Oxford 1985; F. Stack, Pope and Horace: Studies in Imitation, Cambridge 1985; L. Damrosch, Jr, The Imaginative World of Alexander Pope, Berkeley, CA 1987; V. Rumbold, Women’s Place in Pope’s

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become the symbols of the period in which they lived, so that we now speak of ‘ages’ that take their name from them by definition. Like Dryden, Pope considered himself a true member of the fellowship of poets, and kept in his study the portraits of the afore-mentioned writers, in order, he added, with a touch of hypocrisy, ‘to impose upon himself a constant humility’.1 In the period between 1709 and 1744 there were no great poets, and no dictators of literary norms. Pope stepped into the vacancy. Closer scrutiny shows, however, that he laboured under huge disadvantages in his aspiration to become the central reference point for the culture of his time: that he did not have le physique du rôle was unfortunate but not lethal to his expectations; but he was a Catholic, and his religion had to be hidden or played down. So he anonymized it, and practised it clandestinely, in an under-the-counter, even vengeful manner. By the way, none of the four I have mentioned at the beginning was an orthodox Anglican: Jonson converted, ‘de-converted’, then perhaps re-converted to Roman Catholicism on his death bed; Milton was a Puritan; Dryden a Catholic convert. Only Pope was a Catholic at birth, and remained so, though he wrote no religious verse as such, least of all in the passionate, Baroque style of a Crashaw.2 In him, faith and poetry are kept well apart; indeed his last philosophical works are deistic, and present an ethical system independent of religion and metaphysics, dominated by the eighteenth-century episteme of natural theophany. He did not repudiate his

World, Cambridge 1989; F. Rosslyn, Alexander Pope: A Literary Life, Basingstoke 1990; I. R. F. Gordon, A Preface to Pope, 2nd edn, London 1993; Critical Essays on Alexander Pope, ed. W. Jackson and R. P. Yoder, New York and Toronto 1993; P. Baines, The Complete Critical Guide to Alexander Pope, London 2000; N. Murray Goldsmith, Alexander Pope: The Evolution of a Poet, Aldershot 2002; Alexander Pope: A Poet on the Margins and in the Center, ed. F. Gregori, Atlanta, GA 2005 (monographic number of the journal Studies in the Literary Imagination, XXXVIII, no. 1, Spring 2005); N. Curry, Alexander Pope, London 2008. 1 2

In MAR, vol. II, 84. In fact, Crashaw was attacked in a letter quoted by BAUGH, vol. III, 843. B. Dobrée (DEE, 205), on the other hand, mentions ‘borrowings from Crashaw, whom [Pope] had studied for years, and who, on the fusion of human and divine eroticism had much to give him for this subject’, that is, ‘Eloisa to Abelard’.

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Catholicism, but integrated it in a more serene vision which was no longer seen as an ontological necessity and the reason for existence.3 2. Of the four poets mentioned above, Pope is, together with Jonson, the one that has historically aroused least interest and sympathy after his death; more than in the case of Jonson, his greatness has vacillated, and been doubted. His career shows how insecure and shifting were the foundations of his fame in his lifetime. Until recently, Pope was for the English what Vincenzo Monti was for Italians: he was credited with being, at least in theory, a good, indeed excellent, versifier, but was denied any valid human content or profound philosophy. His role as a mere transposer was regarded with suspicion by those who murmured that his philosophical poems were based on outlines written by Bolingbroke. It cannot be denied that several of his poems contain phrases and fragments from the works of other poets. The ostracism to which he was subjected, intermittent but relentless,4 was temporarily checked by Dr Johnson, who dedicated to him the longest of his Lives of the Poets, just a few pages longer than Dryden’s and much longer than Milton’s. The disregard in which Pope was held was, however, largely due to a misconception of Romantic aesthetics, which impinged on him only fifty years after his death and completely overturned Augustan values. According to the Romantics, Pope’s poetry was non-poetry, cold, artificial, with no personal involvement. Even when he meant to be himself, and appeared without his official bardic robes, for the Romantics he was stiff, rhetorical and ‘literary’. When he chatted, he chatted as from a pulpit, and seemed certain that his words would sooner or later appear in print. ‘Correctness’ was the mantra handed to the young Pope by the minor critic, William Walsh. He was considered ‘flawless’ by Byron, the only Romantic poet to appreciate him. By the end of the nineteenth century, he had touched the height of unpopularity, and become the most underrated and vilified of the

3

4

The importance of Pope’s Catholicism has been studied by contributors to Gregori 2005. No general consensus of opinion appears to have been reached. According to Johnson, the dying Pope was given the last rites by a priest, but said to a confidant: ‘I do not think it essential, but it will be very right; and I thank you for putting me in mind of it’ ( JLI, vol. II, 291, and, further, 303). Gordon 1993, 49.

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great figures of literary history. Arnold called him a master of prose; Taine addressed his most ferocious work of critical demolition to him,5 dictated by the Romantic belief (almost as if he were paraphrasing Giordano Bruno) that great poetry requires great love, a synonym for authenticity of feeling. Reading ‘Eloisa’ had left him, he said, bored, tired and yawning; instead of making the reader’s blood race, Eloisa speaks like Cicero in court. The poem is all decoration and frills, like an aria in some opera; there is no truth in it. The Dunciad was insipid; or rather, it was disgusting. Taine acknowledged only that some of the individual lines in Pope were real jewels: a kind of fortunate pointillism. Arnold would have added that they are excellent versifications of prose. Another historic reader, Saintsbury,6 wrote a rather biting sketch of Pope’s not very likeable character, his tightfistedness and his tendency to mock and lampoon his enemies. Edith Sitwell’s critique caused an uproar in 1930, and was reviewed by Orwell7 together with another book that argued in defence of Pope, underlining his ‘classical’ gifts of detachment and discretion. According to Orwell, Sitwell found in Pope anticipations of Francis Thompson and Hopkins. Orwell was unconvinced and continued to view Pope as a dry, unoriginal writer, in line with current thinking. In fact, Sitwell had provided a new perspective: in the early poetry, written when Pope was still in his teens, she found personal vibrations that would later be smothered; in this respect, these youthful poems are more modern than those written by the adult Pope. Pope criticizes foolishness with a lightness and melancholy that foreshadow the imminent pre-Romantic movement. Now and again we find recognizable signs of a vivid sense of landscape, and, in the elegies, the stirrings of nascent graveyardism. 3. Despite all, Pope is one of the greatest masters of poetic form in any literature. By general consensus, he is defined by one of his own maxims: he is the poet who can say ‘what oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d’. Not a creator of new ideas, therefore, but a gatherer of old ones, tried and trusty. Pope excels in paraphrase that improves on the original; while still a child he read so voraciously as to build up a huge store of words and 5 6 7

TAI, vol. III, 333–64. SAI, 551. OCE, vol. I, 44–7.

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phrases, epithets and synonyms, with the sole intention of learning how to write. For Johnson he was, of all the poets, the one that was most obsessed and possessed by the labor limae. For all that, it is difficult to find in Pope’s poetry a driving ideal imperative. He is inspired by public events, or, more often, by books he has read. Sometimes a mentor will suggest a subject and urge him to waste no time and write a poem on it. This leads to a number of forced, uninspired poems, more than compensated for, however, by the miracle of The Rape of the Lock. The poet’s apparent indifference to his subject might suggest a far-fetched comparison with Joyce, so different in all respects: both ransacked the treasure chest of tradition with the sole aim of absorbing various styles and, from the mixture, created for themselves a style of their own. Two hundred years before Joyce, Pope might have said, like the author of Ulysses, ‘I’m only interested in style’. What he did was to stuff his mind full of poetic formulas to be kept at his disposal and used when needed.8 Arnold, too, said that Pope, unlike Homer, never loses sight of style, and transforms reality into style. The message becomes the medium. Right from the very start, Pope was a counterfeiter: he lied about his age when he passed off as juvenile, works which appear to have been written later, and altered them on the quiet before publication. He faked his own letters, collected and published in 1737, in which many, originally addressed to one correspondent, were re-addressed to another. Then, of course, there is the incontrovertible fact that his best works are imitations of the classics, especially the Horatian satires of his last period. Pope is characterized by a series of absences: he has no authentic passion or pathos; he has no real sense of nature; he has no lyric voice; he has no personal inspiration, and so takes refuge in translation. Even then, as a translator, he is hampered by his limited knowledge of Greek, and as an editor of Shakespeare he does not possess the knowledge for the job. 4. Joyce confessed to a similar lack of originality: like Pope, he needed the help of outlines and pre-existing models in order to re-invent, or more precisely, re-create. The key of Pope’s work, its pervasive feature, is the idea of imitation in the most elevated sense of the term. Pope tries out various 8

Cf. Fraser 1978, 40, for a slightly different comparison with Joyce.

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poetic styles, and reaches his highest point with his translation of Homer – which, in the end, is not Homer, but Pope, and a work not of mediation but of self-declaration. He began his poetic career writing parody – imitations and re-workings – as if he were trying to take on the identity of famous predecessors and speak with their voice. He also wrote, when still very young, a lengthy didactic poem. An indication that Pope belongs to the world of ‘metaliterature’ is found in the refined intertextuality of The Rape of the Lock. This was followed by two famous works that are, in fact, impersonations. His career can be seen as two distinct phases, with, in the middle, the translations from Homer; a gap of more than ten years. The poems of the first period were collected and published in 1717; the second period begins with the moral epistles and culminates with the Dunciad. The Pope of the first period is an imperturbable, ironic dispenser of epigrams on the orderliness of the created world, and on art as a reflection of it. Of course, far from being monotonous and repetitive, the orderliness in question is varied, and expressed in internal antitheses or dualisms, like town and country, or different styles of architecture or cultural models. In this first phase, characterized by friendliness, tolerance, and benevolence, Pope transmits the idea of a rational, intelligible universe. This optimistic vision excludes nothing, although Pope had various adversaries who did not share his utopian conviction that contemporary society represented civilization at its highest possible level; like Dryden, he thought that a state of near perfection had been reached, from which there was no going back, or forward, either. A comparison with Swift is straightforward, at least up to 1717: Pope loves the human race, and wishes to correct it and improve it; Swift loathes it. Pope justified himself with Swift in order to attempt a gentle correction of the character or manners that were under attack. § 75. Pope II: Poetic experiments up to the Homeric translations Pope’s father was a cloth merchant with a taste for literature, who, perhaps influenced by his business contacts in Portugal, had become a Catholic. When his son was still in his teens, Pope Senior had, wisely, retired to Binfield, in Windsor Forest, to live on the fruits of his commercial labours. Because of his religion, Pope was denied access to public schools and the universities. Although he did have a priest as tutor, he was,

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to all intents and purposes, self-taught. He excelled at languages,9 and at the age of twelve wrote a Horatian ode on solitude which, in five quatrains of earnest but subdued verses, exalts the peace of the countryside and announces fulfilment. Of himself, he said that, little more than a baby, he ‘already lisped in numbers’. By 1709 he was considered a child prodigy by the most important writers of the capital.10 He contracted Pott’s disease, also known as tuberculosis of the bones,11 which stunted his growth, so that his maximum height as an adult was about four and a half feet. The result was that he was looked upon as a freak, and had to adopt various stratagems to face many everyday challenges. However, as remarked by Johnson, the young Pope had noble features, with sharp, lively eyes, as seen in numerous contemporary portraits, where he is always shown from the waist up. The parallel with Leopardi is de rigueur – there were the same frustrations arising from his deformity, exclusion from the pleasures of life,12 the withdrawal into uninterrupted reading, and the feverish pursuit of excellence in writing. It might also be said that, at a distance of fifty years, another Milton was born, intent on claiming as his right the whole wealth of classical literature, but from a non-Puritan standpoint. He was stubbornly determined to become the greatest genius that had ever existed, and drew up an agenda that comprised every style, genre and subject imaginable. He wrote drafts for a comedy, a tragedy, an epic poem,13 as well as panegyrics

9 10 11 12

13

For some it was only a smattering, or even none at all, a mere boast on the part of Pope (CHI, vol. IX, 67). See § 55.1 on his friendship with Wycherley. Cf., to mention only one, Fraser 1978, 11, 15, on the legendary origin of this disease (according to which Pope was crushed by a cow near his father’s shop in London, or may have drunk infected cow’s milk). But not those of the table. Johnson points out that ‘he loved meat highly seasoned and of strong taste; and, at the intervals of the table, amused himself with biscuits and dry conserves’; that he never refused a glass of good wine and that his death was due to ‘a silver saucepan, in which it was his delight to heat potted lampreys’ ( JLI, vol. II, 295). The subject, which, in Johnson’s opinion, Pope had done well to abandon because it was a ‘ridiculous fiction’ ( JLI, vol. II, 289), was Trojan Brutus, the mythical founder of Britain.

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addressed to the crowned heads of Europe. On the death of his father, he and his mother moved to Twickenham. Their house had a magnificent garden that represented an amalgam of the concepts of order and wildness. This was the time when Temple and Thomas Browne were holding forth on the practical, symbolic and historical aspects of the upkeep of the hortus conclusus. A tunnel led from the house to the garden (Pope called it his ‘grotto’), which became famous for the extravagant decorations and ingenious kaleidoscopic effects that turned it into a private sanctuary à la Huysmans, destined to delight later decadents like Praz.14 One of the dominating, constant oppositions in Pope expresses, on one hand, an urge to socialize, on the other, the desire for solitude, along with the cultivation of solipsism, which was emotionally gratifying but politically frustrating. 2. As I have said above, the young Pope had received and appreciated the advice of the influential critic, William Walsh, to do his utmost to become the first ‘correct’ poet in the English language. Pope did not disappoint him. ‘Correctness’ signified density, concentration, sobriety and precision, starting from the primary cell of the poem, the single rhymed couplet, a measure which Pope polishes and refines. He began his career with imitations, as has been said, of authors ranging from Chaucer to Rochester, each about 100 lines long, and clearly declared to be ‘in imitation of ’ so and so. In a sense, this ability to mimic the voice and manners of other writers is already a quite Joycean trait. The ‘Pastorals’ (1709) consist of four dialogues between shepherds (one dialogue each season), heavily indebted to the tradition of Virgil and Theocritus, in which the only personal note is the exclusion from and the impossibility to love, through the exploitation of a small number of fictitious characters. That ‘The Temple of Fame’ is a remake is now accepted by all: in a footnote, Pope himself mentions the almost homonymous poem by Chaucer as his source, but the layout of the work, the descriptions, and the reflections are all his own, and owe nothing to Chaucer. Significantly, in this poem Pope subscribes to the idea that Fame rewards, not the person who boasts about what he has done, but one who lives humbly and piously, doing good without ostentation. Windsor Forest (1713) is vaguely modelled 14

See the splendid short descriptions in ‘La grotta di Pope’ and ‘Ruderi rococò’, in M. Praz, Fiori freschi, Milano 1982, 297–300 and 301–3.

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on Denham’s Cooper’s Hill, but lists many poets and kings associated with that particular place. Pope took the advice of those who suggested writing a poem to celebrate the Peace of Utrecht after the model of Virgil’s fourth Eclogue. The protasis gives rise to the fixed idea of the forest as the epitome of the world, and, consequently, a mixture of order and chaos, as seen in the different descriptive parts of the poem, not always, it must be said, harmoniously joined together. The multi-coloured variety of the created world looks forward to the ‘brinded’ world of Hopkins. An encomiastic coda is stuck on to drive home the message that the picture of abundance, of nature’s fertility and peace, is due largely to the benevolence of Queen Anne. History is progressive, not cyclical; Pope seems to echo Dryden when he states that peace and the height of civilization itself have been reached now, while before men had languished under a despotic, barbaric regime. Windsor Forest provides space for social activities, but also welcomes the man in search of solitude. After the purple passages of the hunter and the angler, the pheasant with the bloodied breast, and the legend of the nymph, Lodona, who becomes the river Loddon while fleeing from the lustful god, Pan, the poet gives voice to a moving, almost Shelleyan, hymn to the peace of the forest. A millennarist note rings out in another remake, this time from the Bible: ‘Messiah’. An Essay on Criticism (1711) is a diagnosis or manifesto of aesthetics of the kind that are normally written at the end of a career, not by poets who are still finding their feet. Pope is a brilliant synthesizer, and in this poem shows great skill in compacting (a bit less in coordinating) and tying together laboured conceptualizations by Boileau and others, to form memorable nuggets of what sounds like self-evident ‘truth’. It represents a moment of transition and metapoetry, as shown clearly in the title: rarely is an essay written in verse, and even less often does a poem busy itself with criticism rather than with emotion. The quintessence of Pope’s thought, and of Augustan thought in general, is artistic moderation as a balance between extremes, and sound ‘judgement’, one of the factors in the semantic equation defining ‘wit’. Much-praised ‘nature’ implies the banishing of all extravagance. Rules ‘methodize’ nature, but critics should beware of nit-picking, and look, instead, at the whole, and the overall structure of the work of art. It is a warning blast, heralding the coming all-out attack on the stupidity of poets and critics alike. Enter Pope the satirist.

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3. The Rape of the Lock appeared in various versions, like his second masterpiece: the first, in 1712, pronounced ‘perfect’ by Addison, was shorter and more essential than the edition that followed in 1714, to which had been added, together with a number of secondary anecdotes, an array of ‘supernatural machinery’ in the form of sylphs, both benign and mischievous. The poem is based on a real event, a trivial incident – a kind of storm in a tea-cup: a certain lord had cut from the head of his loved one a lock of her hair; this had led to a quarrel between the two families. Not for the first time, it was a friend, this time, Caryll, who suggested Pope might write something on the subject. Pope took the title, and nothing else, from Tassoni’s La secchia rapita [The Rape of the Pail]; but The Rape is a construct of imitations, one inside another, like a game of Chinese boxes; behind and above them all tower the great poems of antiquity. Representing the moderns is Boileau’s Lutrin, already the object of imitation in England at the hands of Samuel Garth, who transformed it into a ‘quarrel between chemists’ under the title of The Dispensary; more recent were the badinages of another Frenchman, Voiture. Now, the Rape is a hapax: Pope was to write nothing like it again, nothing so airy, so fantastic, and so impalpable. It is also a scale model of early eighteenth-century England, of the ideals and pseudo-values of the time, identified and described with benevolence, indeed with a hint of complicity. It represents a return, after a short pause, to the cult of pastiche and rifacimento: the Aeneid, Paradise Lost, and Homer are revisited and revived in mock-heroic mode in a series of standard episodes: the storm scene, with the sylph who says his name is Ariel, is clearly a reference to Shakespeare; when Belinda travels down the Thames to Hampton Court the reader cannot but think of Cleopatra’s more magnificent progress on the Cydnus. In Canto II, Ariel parodies Satan when he spreads his wings and convenes a council of his trusty followers. The sudden mixing of the elevated with the bathetic, of heroic deeds with trivial events (like the Queen, who, at the royal palace, ‘sometimes council takes, and sometimes tea’) would have met with Byron’s approval; in fact, Byron employed this stratagy of antitheses to great effect in his own works. For the first and only time, Pope appears here as a skilful cartoonist, capable, with a few brief strokes of the pen or spatula, of capturing Belinda as she wakes up, then sits at her dressing table surrounded by a cheerful confusion of odds and

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ends. Canto III contains the pièce de résistance, the game of ombre, followed by the ritual of coffee-taking, obviously in mock-heroic terms. The canto ends with a nail-biting description of the cutting off of the lock by means of a ‘glittering forfex’, a kenning that is the Latin word for ‘scissor’, but also, with hindsight, the Joycean earwig that crawls into Earwicker’s ear, just where the lock is placed. Pope, whose sense of humour is indifferent, has an intervening sylph sliced in two by the blades of the scissors: no real damage is done, since ‘airy substance soon unites again’. The lock ascends to heaven in a parody of the Assumption, just as Belinda at her toilet was a parody of Eucharistic transubstantiation. In heaven, as in a kind of cemetery, are various earthly appliances, now abandoned, that serve as a reminder of the caducity of all material things. Only the lock, immortalized in poetry, will survive. So, it is better to shake hands and make peace. 4. ‘Eloisa to Abelard’, an echo of the departure for Turkey of the beloved but aloofly scornful Lady Montague, and ‘Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady’ were written in 1717, and are to be seen as a change in direction in Pope’s artistic development. The former is a story of passionate love – ecstatic, superhuman, mad – so intense and authentic, says the narrating voice, as to merit absolution by a loving god. The poet’s emotion is expressed rhetorically, to be sure, but it is not insincere. The poem may be read as yet another attempt to probe the mysterious pathos resulting from a tale of extreme and desperate love. It can also be seen as an experiment in style and register, with much in common with heroic drama: an uncle in the background trying to stand between the love of his niece for the exceptional ‘house-guest’; letters that are intercepted; the woman who has a servant bring her a sword with which she kills herself. ‘Eloisa’ is an objective correlative, in which Pope masks and ‘transgenders’ whatever passion he may have felt and repressed. The sources are Ovid’s Heroides and the underlying model John Hughes’s 1713 version of the letters of the two French lovers. 5. Between 1715 and 1720, financed by subscription, and at the rate of fifty verses per day, Pope’s translation of the Iliad presented itself to the world. The first of the six volumes appeared on the same day as Thomas Tickell’s translation of the first book of the same epic, sponsored by a rancorous Addison who had fallen out with Pope. When, with the help of two

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assistants, he completed his translation of the Odyssey (1725–1726), Pope felt he had achieved his dream of surpassing Dryden, who had translated all of Virgil. With these two translations Pope earned a total of 10,000 pounds, a sum he used to buy the house in Twickenham and ensure his future economic independence. Pope’s ideas on translation, based on La Motte, who had translated Homer into French, centred on the need to re-write the Homeric poems as if the author were an eighteenth-century poet. As a translator of Homer, Pope should be seen in the light of a comment by the illustrious classicist and philologist, Richard Bentley: ‘It is a pretty poem, Mr Pope, but you must not call it Homer’. Bentley had unwittingly hit the nail on the head, and had identified the very result Pope was aiming at: that is to say, Pope’s Homer is itself a kind of parody, because it does not vie with the original, or attempt to replicate it by transposition into an approximately mimetic linguistic code. He changes everything – colour, register, atmosphere – just as in standard rifacimenti.15 Johnson was of the opinion that Pope worked not from the original Greek, but from Chapman’s version. The best way to test this is a word by word comparison of source text and translation. This shows the scarcity of literal correspondence, and leads to the conclusion that, with his ‘translation’, Pope has, in fact, written a completely new work, rather than a text of ‘utility’, and with little relationship to the original. So Bentley was right to consider it a different thing to Homer.16 His edition of the works of Shakespeare (1724–1725) was savaged a year later by Theobald, himself a competent editor; but, in the context of Pope’s production, it must be seen as another case of imitation, as well as correction and intervention in the canon, given the high number of arbitrary amendments to the text.

15 16

Here, too, we find striking examples of kennings, some of them humorous, others whimsical (‘the vengeful hornet’ comes to mind). Praz gives a detailed and scholarly comment on Pope’s Iliad, and provides a meticulous comparison with the Homeric original (bringing out the liberties Pope has taken), and with the French versions of La Motte and Mme Dacier (Praz 1947, 144–228). His analysis of Pope’s subsequent poetry is much more perfunctory.

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§ 76. Pope III: Hordes of disorder In the Essay on Man17 (1733–1734) Pope once again employs verse to debate and illustrate subjects usually left to prose, and philosophical prose at that. The Essay is a little presumptuous, a forerunner, perhaps, of those manuals of philosophy and folk wisdom that were to be so popular with the Victorians. Pope is careful not to interlace his discourse with anecdotes, examples, or digressions, but sticks without wavering to the rigid protocol of heuristic argumentation, such as the presentation of material divided into four sections, oddly called ‘epistles’, which are, in turn, divided into numbered sections. The poem lays itself open to attack as a congeries of familiar, worn-out aphorisms, however stylistically impeccable, that end up by tiring and boring the reader. As soon as it appeared, it was discussed and challenged by the French Calvinist theologian, Jean-Pierre de Crousaz, and much later was subjected to pitiless, piercing analysis by Taine, who suggested turning it into prose to bring out the banality of its contents. The ideological setting of the poem is that of the Enlightenment, hence the emphasis on stability, balance, and harmony in all sectors of existence. Pope is mild-mannered: he does not use the whip, but dispenses warm invitations to temperance like a wise independent advisor. The tragic forms no part of his Weltanschauung. All reference to revealed religion is omitted in the name of an ecumenical and Enlightenment recognition of a world that is Christian only in part. His humanism rejects extremes: on one hand, it tells us not to deny that part of us that links us to animals; on the other, it warns against pride, and the temptation to believe we are ‘as gods’. Reasonableness is that uniquely human virtue that helps us to dominate our passions and understand the simple truth, that creation is perfect Leibnizian order, in which ‘All that is, is right’.18 In the third and fourth epistles Pope sketches a guide to practical and political reason. Happiness lies in accepting divine will; passions and imperfections must be placed at the service of the common good. Each man, according to his means, history 17 18

The only part to be written of a wider project involving various philosophical essays in verse. Leibniz fits in naturally with the Renaissance idea of the ‘great chain of being’. Pope also helped himself to the contemporary ideas of Bolingbroke and Shaftesbury.

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and civilization, plays a part in creation. In conclusion, Pope, who had earlier cherished solipsism, now presents us with a more mature picture of man as a social and socialized being.19 2. The last ten years of Pope’s activity as a writer produced, first of all, ‘moral essays’, epistles and satires in the style of Horace, with an appendix of re-workings and versifications of those of John Donne. Pope thus proceeds to invent a new genre: loosely constructed verse conversations that abound in variations, but always delivered in the voice and tone of the teacher, admonishing, rectifying, correcting, and advising on good manners. Oldham is credited with being the first to transpose Horatian satire into modern dress and according to modern horizons, as we have seen; but Johnson could remember no previous cases, or later ones, that could equal Pope’s ventures into the genre. The four Moral Essays, formally epistles, deal once again with man and the volatility deriving from his emotions and the impenetrability of his inner world. Female inconstancy is exemplified by characters in part imaginary and in part the aliases of real women, portrayed in incisive and even poisonous vignettes. One pseudophilosophical question that is debated twice, and expressed in the form of a dialogue, is whether it is better to be rich or poor, and whether money is useful or dangerous. Pope does not stray far from his favourite axioms – the importance of reasonableness and common sense, of truth to nature, which helps us to avoid exaggeration in excess or defect, itself an often repeated requirement of good taste. Addressing the architect, Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington,20 Pope decrees that all architecture should naturally fit the geography of its site, and not be forced upon it. Magnificence jars, and is not synonymous with greatness, which lies, instead, in the harmony of the individual parts. The epistle to Arbuthnot,21 the first of the great satires, actually reads like a dramatic monologue in mimetic mode, launched in

19

That it is indeed a parenthesis is suggested by the fact that the fourth book of the Dunciad was meant to be a continuation of this Essay. 20 An enthusiastic follower of Palladianism, he designed and built villas and luxurious palaces in the style of the Paduan master. 21 Arbuthnot (§ 80) contributed to the notes of the Dunciad. Pope was particularly fond of him because Arbuthnot had saved his life, as we read in this epistle.

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medias res, and addressed to someone present. It is effervescent, full of exclamations, interjections, sudden changes of direction; for all the world like Browning. Pope speaks of himself in the third person, examines himself, likes what he sees, glories in the role of the mentor who guides and advises young poets, gives his imprimatur for new books. In short, he displays a conciliatory Horatian bonhomie, and, if he appears to lose his temper, remains, for all that, a well-meaning, though crusty, fellow. 3. In the epistle, ‘To Augustus’, the whole canon of English literature is rummaged through and categorized by pithy one-line judgements, in the conviction that the good old days have disappeared under a deluge of scribblers and their worthless scribblings.22 Pope counsels a return to an art rooted in English soil, not Frenchified. In reality, to take a step backwards, on the publication of Pope’s ‘Pastorals’, Ambrose Philips had responded by publishing his own, which were unjustly praised to the skies, causing Pope to protest from the columns of The Guardian. The critic and playwright, John Dennis, had, in turn, attacked the Essay on Criticism, giving rise to a bitter, lifelong enmity between the two. Pope had been spiritually and politically close to Addison and Steele, and had published various poems and prose pieces in their periodicals. After the death of Queen Anne, in 1714, he joined Swift, Gay, Parnell23 and Arbuthnot in the Scriblerus Club.24

22 This is a paraphrase of a definition contained in the diagnosis of Pope’s alter ego, Martinus Scriblerus (§ 80). 23 Thomas Parnell (1679–1718), an ancestor of the Irish statesman mentioned by Joyce in practically every page he wrote. A deacon and archdeacon of the Irish Anglican Church, at the death of his wife he was affectionately ‘adopted’ by Swift and Pope, only to die suddenly, probably of liver cirrhosis. He collaborated in Pope’s translation of the Iliad, and added a learned essay. He also wrote bitter satires on female affectation, and a few elegies. 24 As well as the Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus (§ 80), the club produced in 1727 Peri Bathous (a joint publication, but in reality almost entirely by Pope), an ironic, inverted ars poetica that listed and mocked the rules of anti-poetry (darkness, confusion, affectation, which were, in part, components of Longinus’ sublime), and can be seen as a trial-run for the Dunciad. It is superfluous to add that the critical term ‘bathos’, much used everywhere and in this history of mine, too, derives from the Scriblerian text.

§ 76. Pope III: Hordes of disorder

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Within a few months, however, the little Tory coalition had collapsed. After 1730, Pope banishes, exiles and demonizes his enemies, no longer willing to turn on them a benevolently blind eye. Before 1725 his writings had already been ‘apocalyptic’, in one of the two senses of the word, the expectation of a golden age. Now it became apocalyptic in the other sense: that is, it expresses the fear that the world he has built up in his imagination is under threat, and soon will crumble and fall. Another vision takes shape: chaos, and the utter destruction of the civilization Pope had always fought for. The Dunciad25 was a last vain attempt to immobilize and freeze this civilization. It took him fifteen long, difficult years to write the three versions that have come down to us: the first was published anonymously in 1728 in three books; dedicated to Swift, it was meant to be part of a miscellany, but turned out to be too long, and was thus rejected; another version was published in 1729 with the title, The Dunciad Variorum, in which he added a prose apparatus, and gave the real names of the targets of his attacks; in 1742 a fourth book was added, and the main target of the satire changed from the philologist, Theobald, to the poet, Cibber;26 1743

25

26

‘Dunciad’ is a neologism derived from ‘dunce’, which, in turn, derives from ‘Duns Scotus’, the mediaeval philosopher who was accused by his adversaries of being a hair-splitting sophist (see Volume 1, § 7.1 n. 2). The mockery was taken up by Swift in Gulliver, in Part III of which Aristotle calls Scotus and Ramus ‘dunces’. Colley Cibber (1671–1757), actor, playwright, competent adaptor of Shakespeare (in particular, of Richard III) and in later life of Molière, specialized in completing other writers’ unfinished manuscripts (Vanbrugh was one of them); he was also a theatre manager and wrote an autobiography full of valuable information on the theatre of the day. The fatuous son of a Danish sculptor, he was appointed Poet Laureate in 1730, a position unattainable by Pope because of his religion. Cibber authored about thirty plays, which were successful at the time, written expressly for famous actors, among whom, himself. His ideas on the theatre matched those of Dennis (§ 79), in that he approved of the moralizing function of drama (through the exemplary punishment of vice, and the timely, though casual, repentance of the libertine husband), and denounced the gratuitous display of licentiousness. His Love’s Last Shift (1696) ushered in sentimental drama and the genteel Steele. Pope’s animosity was due both to the real shortcomings of Cibber as a poet, and to his allegiance to the Whig faction and its support of the Hanoverian dynasty (he even wrote a play with an unequivocal anti-Jacobite message). Cibber wrote Pope three open letters,

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saw the appearance of the New Dunciad, a final version edited by William Warburton. As in the case of The Rape of the Lock, the later version is the one generally referred to, in this case the third or fourth Dunciad; but here not much is gained by choosing one or the other of the various versions, while in the case of the Rape the difference is substantial. Contemporary readers27 would certainly have been able to identify and decipher the myriad references in the Dunciad with no great difficulty, but the modern one must necessarily use explanatory notes (which, more often than not, are notes on Pope’s notes!). Many possible readers are therefore left by the wayside, as is the case with much militant satire. Invaluable assistance, however, is provided by the four ‘arguments’ summarizing the internal evolution of the poem. The dunces are all those poetasters and second- or third-rate playwrights that have dragged down the level of English culture in the 1730s, and still are allowed to congregate at the court of an insouciant George II. The Goddess Dullness breathes on the fire of inertia, laziness, and sloth. The shade of Swift rises up when the scribbling rabble sinks into a sea of mud and excrement. The final prospects are inauspicious: sleep, drowsiness, and chaos-engendering darkness rule and will continue to rule. In the final lines of the poem can be heard the tolling of a funeral bell in a truly symphonic mimesis. The political context of the poem is that of the minority fringe of the Tory party, to which Pope and Swift belonged, and of the Whig regime of Walpole, no friend to true poets, tolerating only propagandists and scribblers who have sold their souls for lucre and position. The coronation of Cibber by Dullness recalls a similar case from fifty in which he pleaded to know the reason for the virulence of the Dunciad. Today he shines with reflected light, although he has acquired a number of objective champions. The entire eighteenth century turned its back on him, starting with Johnson and Fielding, but the Romantics allowed him considerable professionalism, and, in a period devoid of great names, the role of most important man of the theatre between Vanbrugh and Steele. The Victorians thrust him back down the ladder, and the twentieth century pushed him even deeper. 27 But see Swift’s letter from Ireland complaining of the fact that ‘twenty miles from London no one understands allusions, initials, and events that took place in the capital’. He prophesies that in a few years’ time, not even Londoners would be able to catch all the allusions and references.

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years before, the retaliatory coronation of Flecknoe by Dryden, another disappointed man. § 77. Prior One can, indeed must, see Matthew Prior (1664–1721) against the light of Pope. His family was even lower in the social scale than that of Pope, whose father was, after all, a sophisticated merchant, while Prior was the son of a joiner, or so it appears. When his father died, he was brought up by an uncle, who some say was a tavern-keeper, others a butcher. He did have, however, solid religious credentials, since his original family had been Presbyterian. So that, with the aid of serendipity, he managed to climb his way to the top of a diplomatic career, during which he was ambassador to several prestigious and important courts and chancelleries, first under William and Mary, then under Anne. For him the door to royal favour was open, and access granted to high positions such as were denied to Pope.1 In a strictly chronological sense, Prior should come before Pope, but Pope sets the standard for the entire age, and must come first. On the other hand, it is true that Prior was older than Pope by a generation, and had already written most of his poetry when Pope was still ‘lisping in numbers’. In any case, Prior is the most important poet in that temporal gap – more than ten years – between the death of Dryden and the first of Pope’s works. The first of the two to die, he left Pope free to dominate the field of poetry for

1

The life of the shop boy, Matthew Prior, was changed by the Earl of Dorset, who, on a chance visit to the shop, happened to see the youngster behind the counter intent on reading Horace. Dorset asked him to read and translate a passage, saw that he was very good, and paid for his studies at Cambridge, which became the starting point of his diplomatic career. In 1690 he was sent to join the staff of the embassy at The Hague, where he spent the next seven years. Secretary to the British Embassy in Paris in 1698, he gave, to the amusement of the courtiers, some biting repartee which Dr Johnson reports. Amongst other things, he was Undersecretary of State, and one of the signatories of the Peace of Utrecht in 1713. When the Whigs came to power in 1714, he was pumped, in vain, for diplomatic secrets, and placed under house arrest for two years. On his release, he made good use of the money he had earned from his writings, together with gifts from Harley, and retired to Down Hall in Essex, where he lived out his days in peace.

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another twenty years. The differences between the two are considerable: Pope was intensely aware of being a professional poet, while Prior was, first of all, a diplomat, then a poet in his spare time, a dilettante like Carew and Waller, to whom he is linked not only by this coincidence. Pope looked down on him, and most of the time ignored him; Prior looked up to Pope, mentioned him in his poems, and even attempted to imitate his style.2 Prior never had to bear the burden of being the official representative of a whole age; he is more spontaneous, transgressive, even, and speaks only for himself. Johnson suspected him of leading a double life, and recalled that when Prior took off his ambassadorial and diplomatic robes, he would go to the tavern and drink, and lived with ‘a despicable drab’.3 In short he presents him as a kind of ante litteram bohemian. From the point of view of ideas, Prior is the very opposite of the Augustan optimist: he laments the vanity of all earthly things in two long poems that mirror each other in contents though not in form; he is less secure and polished than the young Pope, and less inclined to lay down the law in lapidary, axiomatic sentences. A pessimistic, nihilistic vein is discernible here and there, making him more religious, or metaphysical than Pope, though he could never be called a devotional poet. When Prior spreads his wings in his two philosophical poems, he has something of Browning’s verbosity, forever turning on the same insoluble problems. ‘Alma’, a philosophical or reflective poem, is, significantly, the only work by Prior of which Pope is alleged to have said he wished he had written himself. The conclusions drawn in the poem, however, are shaky, and Prior uses Locke and Descartes to deny the primacy of reason and the predominance of this or that emotion. This kind of undulation links him, above all, with Montaigne.

2

3

Prior is mentioned twice by Pope as belonging to the ‘horde of disorder’ in The Dunciad (§ 76.3); one of the many humorous quotations of Pope in Prior (Pope’s ‘Ode on Solitude’) occurs in lines 225–40 of the poem, ‘Solomon’. One of the Montagu brothers, with whom Prior collaborated in his first poetic foray, was lampooned as Bupho in the epistle to Arbuthnot. In ‘Down Hall’ Prior refers to the popularity of Pope’s Homer, which was published in several volumes from 1720. So, there are many cases of cross-referencing, and several literary sallies between the two. For this weekend ‘slumming’ in the Low Countries, see the 1696 poem, ‘The Secretary’.

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2. What is the nature of Prior’s art? What makes him comparable, or even preferable to Pope, as some illustrious readers of the past have found? Anyone who thinks that Prior has the Midas touch, a formidable gift that enables him to turn out hundreds upon hundreds of polished, gleaming lines, should recall Johnson’s authoritative, but, in this case, arbitrary judgement: Prior, he said, received no nocturnal visitations from the Muse, but instead, assembled his verse, laboriously and methodically, having ‘everything by purchase, nothing by gift’. He, too, is an experimenter who said ‘what oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d’. The one ability Johnson acknowledged he possessed was Pope’s ‘correctness’. Prior is always elegant and precise, a craftsman of verse, or rather, a goldsmith. At times he may give the impression of carelessness, but he is, on the contrary, an expert in applying the principle of ars est celare artem. Insofar as he is a fine craftsman, he prefers the short lyric to the long poem; in his case, the shorter the better, and best of all is the epigram. The short odes addressed to Chloe are much read and loved because of their liveliness and pithiness. They are examples of the perfect Cavalier poem brought up to date – charming, witty, funny, at times cynical, they form a kind of parodic counterpoint to the sonnet cycles of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. For Dr Johnson, Chloe was only an ideal woman, hence the much admired objectivisation.4 Prior also excels in anecdotes of real, everyday life, and desecrations of mythological subjects, in which incongruous elements of reality are introduced to contrast with the timelessness of the legendary context, rather like Fragonard or Watteau in rococo sauce. Yet every time Prior chooses as his subject the fleetingness of life, and peers beyond death into the world to come, he strikes a chord which is anything but mediocre, and far from insincere.5 It is no coincidence that in Prior the extremes range from icy coldness to thoughtfulness and scurrility. Last comes a kind of lumbering mass of encomiastic witterings that weigh down and devalue 4 5

Prior never married but had affairs with a variety of women, some of whom, like ‘Jinny’ (see below n. 7) were his housekeepers. See the poem, ‘Imitation’, in which an unidentified friend is invited to carpe diem. A similar, antithetical penitential vein is found in the fine paraphrase of St Paul’s words on the primacy of charity in the first letter to the Corinthians.

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the entire corpus of his poetry.6 Pliability, therefore, is the hallmark of his work, and great variety of tone. Even the couplet is called into question, both in its canonical, ‘heroic’ form, and in its Butlerian octosyllabic variant; he sometimes uses alternating rhyme, and occasionally dabbles in the Spenserian stanza enlarged to ten lines. As we have seen, Johnson’s ‘Life’ of Prior is rather costive in compliments. Like Pope, Prior had no lofty concepts to express; he dealt in commonplaces, and was lacking in inventio, but this did not stop him from acquiring a lasting reputation as a readable poet, someone people turn to because he speaks about the issues of life in an ecumenical language, easily understood by all, part doggerel, part decidedly lofty. Cowper pronounced him a ‘familiar’ poet, and Thackeray considered him one of the most enchanting of humorous poets in the English language. 3. Prior’s Poems appeared in three editions, in 1707, 1709 and 1718.7 The first compositions are parodies that take pre-existing models and turn them inside out; a very early one (1687), in the manner of the medieval goliards, or wandering students, was written in collaboration with Charles Montague, and altered the pitch and tone of the author of The Hind and the Panther. Prior then wrote various imitations of Chaucer, and adapted the medieval poem, ‘The Nut-Brown Maid’, turning it into ‘Henry and Emma’, which was popular up to the end of the century. Prior’s poetry until 1714 is a kind of historical calendar in which are mingled lengthy eulogies in flowing verse, which shine with chauvinistic appreciation of this battle or that, and other events that allowed the valour of Englishmen to be seen in all its glory. An ode by Boileau on the capture of Namur is parodied stanza by stanza, with facing text. The interminable ‘Carmen seculare’ (1700) overflows with tributes to King William. Anecdotes of the everyday life of city dwellers are told in the manner of Boccaccio, that is to say, with abundance of vulgarity and scurrility, and the use of Butler-like

6 7

The modern edition is The Literary Works of Matthew Prior, ed. H. Bunker Wright and M. K. Spears, 2 vols, Oxford 1959, 1971. ‘Jinny the Just’, on the Dutch housekeeper who was his mistress for sixteen years, was rediscovered only in 1907.

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rhymes, as in the following couplet: ‘With oysters, eggs and vermicelli, / She let him almost burst his belly.’ At the other extreme are biting epitaphs and epigrams that repeatedly draw blood. ‘The Dove’ domesticates mythology by means of incongruous, modern, down-to-earth locutions, used to recount an anecdote that unites the contemporary scene to myth, as in future interminglings of narrative planes: Venus, accompanied by an armed guard, arrives on Chloe’s doorstep to reclaim her lost dove. The poem is spoilt by a plunge in good taste at the end, when Cupid searches under Chloe’s skirt until he uncovers the mons Veneris and its silky down, which Cupid mistakes for the dove in question. The well-known poem, ‘The Ladle’, is another victim of the recurrent motif of the descent of the gods into the everyday life of mortals: the promising beginning is ruined by an unnecessarily vulgar ending. The long poem, ‘Alma, or The Progress of the Mind’, on the functions of the mind in the human personality – clearly a parody of the almost homonymous poem by Donne – is full of Butlerian gimmicks and extravagances. Prior himself makes no mystery of his debt to Butler, and confirms it by his choice of metre, the octosyllabic couplet, or ‘Hudibrastic verse’. The poem is an extemporaneous digressive dialogue, on a range of rather trivial subjects, with various satirical sallies against contemporary post-Aristotelian philosophy, between Prior and his friend, Dick Shelton. ‘Solomon’ is King Solomon, who interrogates his wise counsellors on the mystery of creation, and its end, and on the attributes of the Supreme Being. The three cantos that make up the poem lead to the same conclusion: all is vanity. However, in the second the poet discusses earthly pleasures – those of the flesh, but also art, wealth, magnificence and glory; all are found to be unsatisfactory. Worldly power, too, is seen as vain and transient, as Solomon proves to himself by surveying human history from Adam down to the present day. This is where we find the greatest difference with respect to Pope: reason is insufficient to resolve the problem of the ultimate meaning of human and natural life; an angel arrives and explains that everything has a meaning in the mind of God. The road to belief lies through faith. ‘Solomon’ is a dramatic monologue of Browninguesque opulence, with frequent obiter dicta and amplifications. Yet it does not appear to be a work of routine, but rather a searing analysis of some fundamental questions.

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§ 78. Gay* In the latter part of the eighteenth century and for all of the nineteenth, John Gay (1685–1732) was remembered, above all, as the author of about seventy verse fables, published in two series (1727 and 1738), mostly post Aesopian, that is, featuring talking animals like those of the Italian Abbé Giambattista Casti, with the aim of pricking the egotism and pride of the so-called ‘king of creation’, and calling to account Walpole’s corrupt administration. But he was gradually ‘rediscovered’ thanks to The Beggar’s Opera.1 An immediate success when it opened in 1728, it was revived, triumphantly, in London in 1920, and it became even more famous when Bertolt Brecht transformed it into his Dreigroschenoper2 in 1928. Today it is considered to be Gay’s masterpiece. A handful of inspired songs have been extracted from the huge amount of original material, and will ensure that his fame lives on, far from the confines of Academe. The standard version of Gay the poet is that of a good, solid pen-pusher, who seldom excels, but never disappoints. He runs the risk of appearing, in these first decades of the eighteenth century, an anonymous writer, devoid of strong, clear-cut ideas, loitering in the shadows and always in need of someone to give him a push, or a word of advice, or to point him in the right direction. His life seems to have been one long series of changes of mind and

*

1

Dramatic Works, ed. J. Fuller, Oxford 1983; Poetry and Prose, ed. V. A. Dearing and C. Beckwith, 2 vols, Oxford 1974. W. E. Schulz, Gay’s ‘Beggar’s Opera’, New Haven, CT 1923; P. F. Gaye, John Gay: His Place in the Eighteenth Century, Collins 1938; W. I. Irving, John Gay: Favorite of the Wits, Durham, NC 1940; S. Armens, John Gay, Social Critic, New York 1954; O. Warner, John Gay, London 1964; P. M. Spacks, John Gay, New York 1965; V. Papetti, John Gay o dell’eroicomico, Roma 1971; John Gay and the Scriblerians, ed. P. Lewis and N. Wood, London and New York 1988; C. Winton, John Gay and the London Theatre, Lexington, KY 1993; D. Nokes, John Gay: A Profession of Friendship, Oxford 1995; D. Dugaw, ‘Deep Play’: John Gay and the Invention of Modernity, Newark, DE 2001.

Cibber, in his role as theatre manager, made the disastrous decision of refusing the offer to stage the play. 2 For The Beggar’s Opera in Italy see Praz, in SSI, vol. II, 131–3, in which various films based on Gay’s play are analysed.

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perplexities.3 From his native Devon, Gay came to London when still a child and found employment as a shop boy with a silk merchant. He was there for three years. He returned to Devon, and then went back to London again, where an influential friend from Devon had become an important theatrical impresario.4 The friend started him on his career. From 1712 to 1714 he was secretary to a Duchess, with enough free time to dedicate to his literary vocation. At the beginning of the 1720s, Gay, who had had Whig tendencies up until then, was recruited into the Tory circle of Pope and Swift, and bowed to his superiors’ commands to engage in their bitter literary feuds and party-political sparring. His interventions in these disputes came in all shapes and sizes; he was ready to take up and use any cue that came from the hustle and bustle of London life; he wrote on delinquency,5 the increase in the crime rate, the chaos in moral values, corruption in the governing class that threatened to metastasize into a personal dictatorship, with foreseeable consequences on the by now severely congested urban area of London. As a peripheral member of the Scriblerians, he was ready to back the policy of defamation and the acts of ostracism of Pope and Swift; a farce appeared, the work of the three of them, which targeted an innocuous geologist, used as a smoke screen to hide a greater attack on various eminent men of letters who had incurred the wrath of the Scriblerians.6 His activity as a prolific writer, quite apart

3 4 5

6

And of gender, too: cf. Trivia: o l’arte di camminare per le strade di Londra, ed. R. Birindelli, Parma 2004, 11 and n. 4. The friend in question was Aaron Hill. He invited Handel to come to England and encouraged him to write the 1711 opera, Rinaldo, based on Gerusalemme liberata. Gay met Handel, and worked for him on an opera in English. The Mohocks, the nickname of a gang of criminals, who, dressed as policemen, appear before a Justice of the Peace, until they are found out and unmasked. This is clearly a trial-run of the role inversion in The Beggar’s Opera. Addison’s Spectator of 25 March 1712 contains a reference to these gangs. Three Hours after Marriage. A Doctor Fossil, just married, is unable to enjoy his wife, the object of attention of two suitors who manage to get into the house disguised as a mummy and an alligator. In the end, the good doctor sends the wife packing to her former husband. The main target of the satire was Colley Cibber, who acted in the first performance without realizing that his character was, in fact, a lampoon of

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from his s­ orties into the theatre, is hinted at in the title of his volume of collected poems, published in 1720: Poems on Several Occasions. Gay’s versatility produced a great deal of purely occasional poems, as well as plays written on commission but with little conviction. He managed to make quite a lot of money with these theatrical works, but lost it all when he invested in shares of the South Sea Company, and failed to obtain further support from his patrons. In 1714 he was secretary to Clarendon, but the death of Queen Anne deprived him of this position. He was buried near Chaucer, and his tombstone bears an epitaph written by Pope. Such are the basic facts that led to the creation of the picture of a lazy, pleasant man, capable of opportunism and double-dealing, and who felt no shame in being kept and fed by others without lifting a finger. 2. Of the ten or so plays that he wrote (some belong to the category of the afterpiece, short enough to be used as interludes), only two are in any way memorable, and only one holds a rightful place in the annals of the more noble English theatre. His production, therefore, is difficult to pin down, uneven and experimental. Leaving aside The Beggar’s Opera, Gay is a small-time ventriloquist, so that it is arduous to find a single, unified picture of the author and pick out a common thread in his plays. Not one play is the same as, or even similar to the next. It is not enough to call him a writer of parodies, burlesques and mock-heroics: the fables referred to above are stylistically impeccable and polished; but, we might ask, surprised by the rather naïve exhortations they contain, who wrote them? Who read them? Who paid for them? The heroic couplet is no longer the predominant form, and romantic ballads involving pure, passionate, eternal love, are written in stanza form.7 Towards the end of his life, he provided Handel with the delightful libretto for Acis and Galatea. Trivia is a unique, unclassifiable gem. To sum up, Gay was a gifted, versatile writer, elegant

7

his own literary pretensions. Sir Tremendous, a critic who pronounces on a heroic tragedy written by a woman, represented Dennis, known to all for his fondness for that particular adjective. Among the other ‘Scriblerian’ targets are the woman playwright, Centlivre, and the poet, Lady Winchilsea. ‘Sweet William’ is the famous farewell of ‘black-eyed Susan’ to her lover as he sails off to war. It shows the limits of poetic diction.

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and varied – one might almost say chameleonic – who appears different according to which of his texts are being read or watched. With reference to his major works, it may be said that he is an attentive observer of the social milieu of England in the early eighteenth century. His first poems make much of the contraposition of town and country. Coming as he does from the ‘country’, Gay keeps his eyes well open on the spectacle provided by the metropolis, taking note of the contradictions, and scrutinizing the affectations of the city-dwellers.8 He does not sentimentalize or idealize, but tells what he has seen, holding nothing back. As soon as he is settled in London, he surveys the sea of humanity around him, which includes politicians and literati. Gay’s first work of any importance, Rural Sports (1713), already expresses disgust at the economistic civilization of the capital, and reacts by turning instinctively back to the country. Technically speaking, it is well-written and sure-handed, and includes lively descriptions of such pleasant and gratifying pastimes as hunting and fishing. Life in the country, however, is not static and tame, but shot through with surges that can be seen in the light of the pre-Romanticism to come. Gay sometimes almost bares his teeth to criticize the Londoners’ obsession with appearance. The Shepherd’s Week9 (1714) consists of six eclogues corresponding to the five working days of the week, unlike the Spenserian formula which followed the months of the year. Here the use of archaisms is intrusive, and the pseudo-classical insistence on unpleasant details off-putting. It was Pope who suggested that Gay write this work as a contribution to the campaign of defamation against Ambrose Philips and his pastorals, which symbolized the sugary kind of writing expressed in the term ‘namby-pamby’. Pope could not accept the fact that Philips’ poems10 should be judged superior to his. However, the burlesque intent, visible mainly in the ugly, cacophonic

8 9 10

‘The Fan’ and ‘The Toilet’ are imitations of Pope, who is complimented for his translation of Homer in ‘Mr Pope’s Welcome from Greece’, in flowing eight-line stanzas. A singular feature of this work is a catalogue, tacked on at the end, containing, in alphabetical order, all the names, of plants, flowers, fruits, birds, beasts, insects and ‘other material things’ mentioned in the five eclogues. ‘Blubbered’, used to describe Clumsilis’ lips in the third, Wednesday eclogue, also appears in one of Prior’s most famous songs, dedicated to Chloe.

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names of the shepherds and their lovers, co-exists with a sincere desire to praise the simplicity and authenticity of the country life. Gay tried his hand at elegies, monologues and dialogues on unrequited love involving shepherdesses and farm girls. If Trivia11 (1716) were really based on the Georgics, as is claimed by some, it would be a case of quite extraordinary desecration. There are, to be sure, vivid scenes of town life in it, but above all it is a work of sudden visions, and flashes of oneiric fantasy, confused and jumbled allusions to obscure private particulars. Gay’s discourse often shoots off at a tangent, and loses itself in enigmatic meanderings, only to return to a cosy domestic scene and the reassuring sound of the old familiar moral precepts. The three books are enlivened by continuous burlesque sorties into mythology, forming a counterpoint and a parallel subtext. Precisely because he knows it is a poem bound to disorient the reader, Gay bizarrely includes an index, such as one might find in a guidebook to the city of London, or a dictionary. Each book of the poem has a sub-heading; the narrating voice advises on how to walk around the city, starting with the appropriate shoes and dress. Once out in the streets, the ‘tourist’ is met by various manifestations of a later age, with ostentation of enormous wealth: his reaction is to think back to the good old days of yore. Little by little, Gay constructs a tour de force of parody, thanks to infringements of the didactic plane and shifts in tone. The burlesque element, here as in Pope, lies in the contamination of the everyday with the mythological, the juxtaposition of the banal with the heroic, and in the frequent use of highsounding comparisons.12 Gay tends towards the pastiche, the classic feast of language and a pyrotechnic display of unexpected, obscure fantastications and random flashes of light that appear out of nowhere. The second and third books are complementary, one describing daytime, the other, nighttime scenes. As usual, the didactic objective is not immediately obvious,

11 12

Trivia, too (with the sub-heading The Art of Walking the Streets of London) has an index at the end. See, for example, the brilliant invention of Cloacina, goddess of the sewers, who fell in love with a road sweeper, giving birth to a black child, who will be the origin of the whole African race. Gay returns to the theme of negritude in several of his works, a reflection of the fact that by now the British Empire was a colonial reality.

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and seems to be appended as if as if to indicate certain duties: the need to respect one’s neighbour, to show tolerance, above all, the invitation to be vigilant, since the night-time brings out the bag-snatchers and sex-workers seeking customers. Luckily, the officers of the law are there to keep watch and ensure that public order is preserved. 3. For ‘London’, read ‘Dublin’, jump forward 200 years, and you have Joyce’s Ulysses, a not dissimilar survey of the sights and sounds of a city, cues for digressions, associative fantasies and free-ranging memories,13 with the same antithesis of the ordinary and the sublime, and an imposing excursus into the whole gamut of human functions, down to and including micturition and defecation, and an associated fixation with excrement. The metre used by Gay is the heroic couplet, but the words no longer respect Pope’s dictates of ‘correctness’; they break loose and acquire a freedom of their own. Gay’s ‘walker’ reminds us of Bloom and the theme of ambulation that dominates Joyce’s novel: both characters employ the primary senses, in particular that of smell, and end among the bookstalls. Trivia is itself the account of a day of almost twenty-four hours, a day that starts early in the morning and ends late at night, in a similar atmosphere of transgression and ambiguity. Furthermore, if Ulysses may be considered mock-heroic because of the Homeric parallel, in Gay the mock-heroic is ubiquitous: see, for example, the unfortunate man who has lost his way in the maze of alleys of London, like Theseus in the labyrinth on Crete, and the many other classical references, principally involving Aeneas and Orpheus. 4. The Beggar’s Opera, the fruit of an idea of Swift’s, was first performed in 1728, in the theatre belonging to the manager, Rich, in Lincoln’s Hill Field, and was repeated sixty-two or sixty-three times consecutively. Author and manager both made a great deal of money from it, some of the actors were given peerages and other forms of recognition. It was later taken to other towns in England, and to the colonies, a sign of the great diffusion of the theatre at the time. The idea behind the play is, to tell the 13

Another surreal, ecstatic moment, and of great pictorial and cinematographic (ante litteram) suggestiveness is the description of the freezing over of the Thames in 1683, and the anecdote of the apple vendor that broke the ice, or the episode of the game with the ball, and the noisy smashing of a window.

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truth, more striking than the play itself. It was a hit because the format was new (I am not counting the bland phenomenon of French vaudeville): that is, it consisted of spoken dialogue alternating with songs set to music by the German, Pepusch, a near contemporary and rival of Handel, who, like the composer of Messiah, had left his native Hamburg and settled in London. One of Gay’s intentions was to fire a shot at the Italian opera that was all the rage in London at the time.14 It was, therefore, a conservative gesture, and the sixty-nine songs in the play are parodies of operatic arias. The quarrels of Polly and Lucy are meant to mock the more high-pitched duels between two Italian divas, well known to London audiences, called Cuzzoni and Faustina. Gay’s real stroke of genius was to adapt a number of popular English and Scottish tunes to the words of his songs, creating a tension between music and text. Every song has, together with the page number in the score book, its original title; the audience is being told, in other words, that it is about to hear a familiar song, but with completely different words. The explosive political metaphor underscores the corruption that has infected all levels of the population, destroying moral guidelines, and the terrifyingly destructive power of money in the creation of an increasingly unjust society. With this play, Gay threw his ‘J’accuse’ in the face of Walpole and his regime. 5. Song no. 1 is an ironic snapshot of contemporary mores, a comment on a Hobbesian world in which everyone is at war with everyone else, people are generally ‘on the make’, and the precept, ‘Love thy neighbour’ has no currency. This is the case in every part of the social spectrum; no class is exempt. The omnipotence of money is a theme that runs through the play from beginning to end, and the Hobbesian refrain is repeated and paraphrased, after the ‘fence’, Peachum, by the other official representative of the law, Lockit, the gaoler,15 who soliloquizes on those wild animals that live in solitude, whereas, of all the predators on the face of the earth, only man is a social animal. Each man preys on his fellow, and yet we ‘herd together’. The first act presents a rhetorical action aimed at overturning 14 15

Dennis had been attacking the Italian opera since 1706. One represented Jonathan Wild and the other Charles Hitchin, the duo that controlled London’s underworld.

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consolidated moral values: the Peachums try to dissuade Polly from marrying (but it is too late) because marriage does not pay; if she should marry, then she would be well advised to seek widowhood, by doing away with her husband, thus inheriting his fortune. Polly is, in part, an ingénue who dreams of leading a normal, honest existence, and of dissociating herself from the perversion of morality that surrounds her. Her mother is undecided: first she leans towards her daughter’s arguments, then opts for her husband’s position. Scene 8 shows the parents vainly attempting to talk Polly out of her decision. Peachum subverts accepted morality when he calls his daughter a hussy, when all she wants is to get married. It is true that she is heavily conditioned by her consumption of romances full of chivalry and love. The petty criminals who serve Macheath invoke, in turn, a paradoxical morality by mimicking the behaviour of ‘honest men’. London is a Darwinian microcosm in which everyone is out to make money, and breaking the law is the norm, so one might as well do the same. Besides, the criminals demand a fairer, almost communistic, redistribution of wealth, seeing that there are many rich misers who do not know what to do with their money, and hoard it instead of returning it to the economic cycle. In this regard, Macheath is ‘morally’ admirable, because he administers the proceeds of the company of thieves with justice, and is thus respected by his ‘employees’. He can be seen as a forerunner of the future ‘Newgate rogue’, a character that occasioned sympathy, and gave rise to a narrative genre in the 1830s.16 In Act III, Macheath is helped to escape from prison by a desperate Lucy, who intones a number of tragic arias in imitation of real operas. Macheath is recaptured because the basically healthy gang of thieves has been infected by the virus of corruption, as Macheath himself is forced to admit. The hero is caught on his way to the gallows by the author, who, in the prologue and epilogue, takes on the role of a beggar. In a breach of poetic justice, Macheath is saved and returned safe and sound to his wife, Polly (the audience is not informed of Lucy’s reaction to this). This solution of compromise is tantamount to admitting that everything will be just the same as before. In a sequel, Polly, set in the West Indies,

16

Volume 5, §§ 3 and 20.

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Macheath is transformed into a pirate, complete with blacked-up face, and is, this time, hanged. Walpole, who had applauded The Beggar’s Opera, thought the idea of a sequel was going too far, especially since by this time the political allusion was clear to all. So he banned Polly. § 79. Dennis Pope met his match in John Dennis (1657–1734), a man so naturally litigious and quarrelsome as to be unable to live without someone to insult and fight with. Educated at Harrow and Cambridge, by the time the seventeenth century ended he had crossed the Alps as part of his grand tour to France and Italy. There he experienced and then recounted those feelings of ecstasy and rapture that he subsequently used to formulate an early version of Longinian aesthetics. By the dawning of the eighteenth century, he was one of the society of wits, like Dryden, who held court in the coffee-houses of the capital. A Whig, he wrote poems celebrating William of Orange and the recent victories of the English troops. He was also the author of several mediocre plays in the French neoclassical style. He is primarily important, however, for a number of influential theoretical works: one dedicated to the foundations of criticism (1704), another to textual criticism, as well as a survey of Shakespeare’s dramatic works (1712). His quarrel with Pope has always been reported from the point of view of the latter, who saw Dennis as an authoritative rival that had to be silenced. Dennis’s Appius and Virginia (1709) had been a flop, and in his Essay on Criticism Pope had dedicated three lines, hostile, but normal for the time, to the wouldbe high priest of criticism: ‘But Appius reddens at each word you speak / And stares, tremendous, with a threatening eye, / Like some fierce tyrant in old tapestry’. Dennis retaliated with a mean attack on Pope’s physical appearance, calling him a ‘hump-backed toad’. Pope counterattacked, adding a note to his poem in which he accused Dennis of being a raving lunatic. In short, Dennis had stirred up a hornet’s nest. In actual fact, he and Pope were saying much the same thing, though from opposite sides of the politico-literary divide: literature after Charles II had gone downhill. Dennis then turned his batteries on Cibber and Steele. Pope and Dennis agreed on the importance of ‘correctness’ and the respect for the rules dictated by human nature, the greatest teacher of all, as Pope never tired

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of saying. But obeying the rules pedantically and mechanically was one thing: following them with a certain amount of flexibility was another. A widely held opinion was that the rules in question were not to be attributed, in the abstract, to Aristotle, but were based on the practice that had evolved in several centuries of theatrical activity. As will easily be seen (by Gay, too, at the end of The Beggar’s Opera) the contemporary debate was all about poetic justice, which Dennis and others denied should be applied systematically, because the real reward for our actions, good or bad, is given not in this world, but in the world to come. Dennis may be considered the most paradigmatic representative of a critical praxis that, in the early eighteenth century, was on the way to becoming autonomous, as is proved by the huge number of tracts and treatises that jostled to be noticed in the debate on how and what to write. Fifty years later, Johnson was more cautious in his judgement on Dennis, who was subsequently reclaimed by the unanimous voice of the Romantics, on the basis of Dennis’s conviction that art involves feelings, sense perception, and reason, and that rational certainty is achieved after the involvement of the emotions – not the lower form, but good, healthy enthusiasm. The Romantics also approved of the fact that, for Dennis, poetry was a means of moral improvement, and bore a religious message. He had taken issue with Collier, defending the educational and moralizing role of the theatre, and was, together with Dryden and Rowe, the first ‘serious’, non-extemporary critic of Shakespeare, though tainted by the Illuminist, and Voltairean prejudice that Shakespeare had little taste and fewer ‘letters’. § 80. Arbuthnot Swift famously said that for John Arbuthnot (1667–1735) he would willingly have burnt Gulliver.1 Their friendship began in 1710 when Swift, on his return from Ireland, had founded in London one of the first Tory journals, while Arbuthnot had been a resident of the capital for twentyfive years. With degrees in mathematics and medicine from Aberdeen and Oxford, a member of the Royal Society since 1704, the author of treatises 1

Letter from Swift to Pope, 29 September 1725.

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and texts on various subjects, he had been appointed physician to Queen Anne in 1709. He was a refined, thoughtful man, and much appreciated at court, where his opinions were held in high regard by the Privy Council. There was, however, a hidden side to this pillar of the establishment: in private life he liked to enjoy himself, and appreciated a good joke. Naturally, Swift found in him a man after his own heart. The Scriblerus Club they founded with Pope represents a spark that came from the tinder box of their three imaginations. An early version of the Pickwick Club, a brotherhood born to satirize the enemies of this miniscule group of Tories, the Scriblerus was ambitious but sketchy, and never really took off: projects remained projects, and ideas never progressed beyond the embryonic stage. Any attempt to separate the individual contributions of this or that Scriblerian would be doomed to failure, given that the publications were conceived and written collectively. According to legend, in 1712 Arbuthnot announced the imminent publication of an Art of Political Lying, which was to consist of two large volumes. For the moment, Arbuthnot handed over an extract a few pages long. It is an essay of paradoxical rhetoric, to be deconstructed like those by Swift: the thesis is that a lie is best answered by another lie, or at least a half-truth, and that wherever there is a rumour there is some element of truth. In fact, a half-truth alerts us to a real danger, and, as Machiavelli says, in politics, the end justifies the means. In the same year Arbuthnot invented the nickname of ‘John Bull’ to represent the typical sanguine, patriotic, not to say chauvinistic Englishman, and used it in his History of John Bull in five chapters (1712, published together in 1727), an allegorical attack on Whig policy in the War of Spanish Succession. The mock-heroic nature of the work is immediately apparent in the titles of the chapters, which imitate those in the Jonsonian comedies of humours. The allegory is based on John Bull as a personification of England, and assigns roles to clearly identifiable actors on the contemporary political stage. In the finale, Bull wrests from Frog (Holland) the possession of Dunkerque after the Peace of Utrecht. Today it is still possible to appreciate the liveliness of the sketches, anecdotes and dialogue without bothering about the political controversies from which it all originated. The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, the most famous and tangible fruit of the labours of the club, was included in the 1741 edition of Pope’s works, but was always

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believed to be entirely by Arbuthnot. The prime objective of the founders of the Club, to ridicule the lamentable state of contemporary culture, was achieved thanks to the invention of a character who epitomizes pedantry and absurdity. The project died almost as soon as it was born, and only the first book was actually written. This was sufficient to give some idea of the grotesque mockery, with a touch of whimsicality that brings to mind Laurence Sterne, and even Carlyle, a Scot like Arbuthnot, and the creator of memoirs of another fictitious professor, this time a German. Martinus’ father is an eccentric old Aristotelian grammarian, with his head stuffed full of weird and wonderful notions, so that the education of his son is carried out according to the dusty, medieval system of the trivium and quadrivium. Pages upon pages of hilarious stylistic parody paint a picture of this nightmare Bildung of the unfortunate young man. The account breaks off when Martin begins to pore over absurd problems like those studied by the scientists of Laputa. Indeed he then sets off on a journey to the very lands explored by Gulliver. An eclectic, prolific writer, Arbuthnot was also the author of a number of texts that he did not even bother to sign for posterity. § 81. Bolingbroke Pope’s Tory circle is completed by Henry St John, first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751), who is important not so much in the sphere of literature (in fact, his only literary connection is his brief membership of the Scriblerus Club) as in the history of Toryism in the first half of the eighteenth century. In this context he played the part of the great loser, who fought passionately for almost half a century in the name of a utopian vision that was impotent in the face of the corrupt regime of Walpole and his ministers. One might be tempted to say that Pope was part of Bolingbroke’s circle, rather than the other way round.1 His whirlwind life was restless, full of reverses, bursts of egoism and unselfish gestures. In its way, it was romantic and adventurous. After a misspent youth, he entered

1

Bolingbroke’s rival, Harley, Earl of Oxford, was certainly a member of the Scriblerus Club before politics estranged them.

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the political arena and was among those who supported the Hanoverian succession. At the age of twenty-six, he was already secretary of state and the right-hand man of the Earl of Oxford, with Jacobite tendencies. At the head of an anti-Whig movement, he was tempted to form his own political group, but for the moment the Peace of Utrecht gave him an opportunity to shine on the diplomatic plane (together with Prior, as we have seen). In 1714, with the accession of George I, he lost his posts, and, fearing for his life, repaired to France under the protection of the Pretender. His idea was that the Stuart dynasty could be restored, but not on a confessional basis. This suggestion met with objections from various sides (as seen in a long retrospective letter to his follower, Wyndham). He concluded that there was no longer any political party in England with which he could identify. He addressed a request for pardon to George I, but to no avail. In France he began studying politics, history and philosophy. He became a widower and remarried. In the end he received his pardon thanks to a bribe, paid directly to the king, of 11,000 pounds. Back in England, he recommenced his battle against the Whigs and Walpole from the columns of a new periodical, The Craftsman. This campaign, too, aimed at forming an opposition consisting of Tories and anti-Walpole Whigs, failed, and he was forced to return to France in 1734. Four years later, he was back in England. Bolingbroke had no political advantage from the fall of Walpole. His definitive return to England took place in 1744, when the political temperature was still high. This once good friend of Pope protested violently against the editor, Warburton, because of the comments that Pope had invited him to write on several of Bolingbroke’s manuscripts. When he found out that Pope had had 1,500 unauthorized copies of the Patriot King printed, he issued his own authorized version, and claimed that Pope had betrayed his trust. 2. Bolingbroke started and funded journals expressly for purposes of propaganda: The Examiner came out in forty numbers up to 1712, and, as we have seen, he wrote in The Craftsman from 1726 on. Swift, Pope and Gay also collaborated in this journal in its nine years of existence. Among his less ephemeral works are a series of ‘remarks’, in epistolary form, on the history of England (1730–1731), a work on historiographical methodology, also in the form of eight letters (the basic message of which is that history teaches through examples), and, above all, two utopian manifestos (1736

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and 1738) that call for a new monarchy, and, therefore, for a new nation. Bolingbroke insisted that after 1688 the bi-party system had become obsolete, also because the distinctions of 1688 had been made irrelevant by succeeding events. The new divide was between the country, or civil society as it would come to be called, and the court. Bolingbroke was the greatest contemporary authority on the evolution of the English party-political system. The power of his eloquence is testified by the three editions of his works that were published one after the other up to 1809. The common reader, however, turned against him, and he was dismissed as ‘arrogant and presumptuous’, to use the words of Burke. Voltaire admired him, but observed that the foliage was so thick that it hid the flowers of his eloquence. Like Pope – who as poet and philosopher took from him a deism that chaffed at primitive religion as a form of superstition – Bolingbroke was praised for possessing style in abundance, even for being a master of prose, though ornate and slightly pompous, but ultimately accused for having nothing much to say with it. § 82. Defoe* I: The growth of the novelist Daniel Defoe (1660–1731, originally Foe, changed to Defoe in 1695) began writing novels, or at least a primitive form of the genre, late in life, 1

*

Defoe’s Works, ed. W. R. Owens and P. N. Furbank, 44 vols, London 2001–2008, is still only a selection, consisting of about 100 of the 250 works attributed to Defoe, following a generally accepted reduction of the canon of 547 (according to an estimate by J. R. Moore, A Checklist of the Writings of Daniel Defoe, Bloomington, IN 1960; we find Joyce saying, in 1912, that Defoe ‘set the presses cranking a good two hundred and ten times over’). The Review, complete collection ed. J. McVeagh, 9 vols, London 2011. Letters, ed. G. H. Healey, Oxford 1933, 1955. The Italian edition of the three parts of Robinson Crusoe, trans. A. Meo and G. Sertoli, Torino 1998, contains an extensive introduction by Sertoli (republished in SDR, 45–81) which problematizes the aporias of the novel, and provides an analytical bibliography of studies on Defoe up to the date of publication. Life. J. Sutherland, Defoe, London 1937, 1950; R. Moore, Daniel Defoe: Citizen of the Modern World, Chicago, IL 1958; F. Bastian, Defoe’s Early Life, Totowa, NJ 1981; P. R. Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life, Baltimore, MD and London 1989; M. E. Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions, Oxford 2001; J. J. Richetti, The Life of

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Daniel Defoe: A Critical Biography, Oxford 2005; W. R. Owens and P. N. Furbank, A Political Biography of Daniel Defoe, London 2006. Criticism. Modern criticism begins, to all intents and purposes, with Joyce’s lecture, given in Italian in Trieste in 1912, ‘Daniele Defoe’, now in Scritti italiani, ed. G. Corsini and G. Melchiori, Milano 1979, 142–60 (Eng. trans. in J. Joyce, Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, ed. K. Barry, Harmondsworth 2000, 168–75). The essays by Virginia Woolf, ‘Robinson Crusoe’ and ‘Defoe’, were published in the two series of The Common Reader, London 1925 and 1932. P. Dottin, Daniel De Foe et ses romans, 3 vols, Paris 1924, and, translated and abridged in one vol., London 1929; WATT, 66–151; J. M. E. Novak, Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe, Los Angeles and Berkeley, CA 1962, 1976, Defoe and the Nature of Man, London 1963, and Realism, Myth, and History in Defoe’s Fiction, Lincoln, NE and London 1983; G. Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography, Princeton, NJ 1965, and Defoe and Casuistry, Princeton, NJ 1971; J. P. Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe’s Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in ‘Robinson Crusoe’, Baltimore, MD 1966; R. M. Baine, Daniel Defoe and the Supernatural, Athens, GA 1968; M. Shinagel, Daniel Defoe and Middle-Class Gentility, Cambridge, MA 1968; Twentieth Century Interpretations of ‘Robinson Crusoe’, ed. F. H. Ellis, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1969; Twentieth Century Interpretations of ‘Moll Flanders’, ed. R. C. Elliott, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1970; J. Sutherland, Daniel Defoe: A Critical Study, Cambridge, MA 1971; E. A. James, Daniel Defoe’s Many Voices: A Rhetorical Study of Prose Style and Literary Method, Amsterdam 1972; CRHE, ed. P. Rogers, London and Boston, MA 1972, also the author of ‘Robinson Crusoe’, London 1979; P. Colaiacomo, Biografia del personaggio nei romanzi di Daniel Defoe, Roma 1975; E. Zimmerman, Defoe and the Novel, Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles 1975; J. Richetti, Defoe’s Narratives: Situations and Structures, Oxford 1975, Daniel Defoe, Boston, MA 1987, and, as editor, The Cambridge Companion to Daniel Defoe, Cambridge 2008; Daniel Defoe: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. M. Byrd, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1976; P. Earle, The World of Defoe, London 1977; D. Blewett, Defoe’s Art of Fiction, Toronto 1979; M. Boardman, Defoe and the Uses of Narrative, New Brunswick, NJ 1983; M. Bignami, Daniel Defoe. Dal saggio al romanzo, Firenze 1984; G. M. Sill, Defoe and the Idea of Fiction, Newark, DE 1984; I. Bell, Defoe’s Fiction, London 1985; P. R. Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: Ambition and Innovation, Lexington, KY 1986; M. Bardotti, Times of Pain and Distress. ‘A Journal of the Plague Year’ di Daniel Defoe, Pisa 1990; M. Schornhorn, Defoe’s Politics: Parliament, Power, Kingship, and ‘Robinson Crusoe’, Cambridge 1991; M. Seidel, Robinson Crusoe: Island Myths and the Novel, Boston, MA 1991; L. B. Faller, Crime in Defoe: A New Kind of Writing, Cambridge 1993; L. De Michelis, ‘More World in Trade to Conquer’: la cosmografia mercantile di Daniel Defoe, Milano 1995; S. Sherman, Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century: Accounting for Defoe, Cambridge 1996; K. Clark, Daniel

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at the age of about sixty. Before that he had had several professions, not all of them consonant with a literary vocation, but including a substantial experience in journalism and militant pamphleteering. He was the son of Presbyterian parents from London; his father was a butcher and manufacturer of candles made from animal fat. He was educated in Dissenting schools, where the emphasis was on practical knowledge – science, mathematics and languages – rather than on the classics. And he did not attend a university. After being actively involved on Monmouth’s side in the Exclusion crisis in 1685, he set up as a merchant dealing in woollen goods, but went bankrupt in 1692 (he repaid his creditors to the last penny). In 1695 he was a ‘commissioner for glass duties’; then he turned his hand to brick-making, at first making quite a lot of money. In one of his first pamphlets, an Essay on Projects, written in 1697, he advocated a series of reforms, some of them eccentric, others intelligent and forward-looking, aimed at improving the standard of living and the general level of education. In 1701 he published a verse satire, not very polished but extremely to the point, in favour of William of Orange, the ‘true-born Englishman’. 1702 saw the appearance of The Shortest Way with the Dissenters – a proposal couched so effectively in irony that, though it actually argued for tolerance, was misunderstood, and its author ended up in the pillory (Pope added, erroneously, that he had had his ears cropped too). This experience provided the raw material for a fine Hymn to the Pillory. At the turn of the century, with the help of Harley, Earl of Oxford, he founded the formally Tory paper, The Review, and ran it single-handedly until 1714, supplying all the copy for the thrice-weekly publication, which included a section on ‘aspects of social life’, soon to be imitated by Addison and Steele. When The Review ceased publication, Defoe, already an undercover Whig, joined various Tory papers, his mission being to water down their propaganda. Until 1719 he was constantly to be found in Scotland, attempting to whip up support for the union of the two kingdoms. The contribution of Defoe’s multifarious Defoe: The Whole Frame of Nature, Time and Providence, Houndmills 2007; S. H. Gregg, Defoe’s Writings and Manliness, Farnham 2009; L. Guilhamet, Defoe and the Whig Novel: A Reading of the Major Fiction, Newark, DE 2010; D. Todd, Defoe’s America, Cambridge 2010.

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journalism to the genesis and development of his novel is threefold: first, his militant prose denounces the rampant bribery and corruption of the court, but in the end is always at the service of society as it is, which he is not interested in criticizing, let alone subverting;1 second, his practical approach to social problems co-exists with an urge for and interest in spiritual reform, which he inherited from his Dissenting upbringing; the spiritual diary and the notebook of meditations kept by Dissenters can be seen as steps towards the novel form, written in the first person. Of fundamental importance is his report on ‘the apparition of Mrs Veal in Mrs Bargrave’s house’ (1706), which proves that Defoe believed in the supernatural and its manifestations in the everyday world: reality was full of otherworldly signs and symbols that needed to be interpreted. Joyce saw in these pamphlets ‘the realist in the presence of the unknown’.2 However, Defoe may simply have been exploiting this superstition, and creating, at the same time, an advance instance of the neo-Gothic. An expert in the devil, but always within the confines of an ambiguous, parodic agnosticism, Defoe envisages life as an all-out contest, and he eventually resolved to write a ‘political history’ of the devil in 1726.3 The third context of his apprenticeship is that of his biographies of historical figures (in 1720, a deaf and dumb magician called Duncan Campbell, and in 1723 Peter the

1 2

3

Defoe’s political ideas were laid out in the poem, ‘Jure Divino’ (1706), where he denies the divine right of kings, and asserts that monarchy is founded on the law and the right of all citizens to defend their freedom to the utmost. Joyce uses throughout the Italian terms ‘verismo’ and ‘verista’ rather than ‘realismo’ and ‘realista’, referring to a literary movement (which has no equivalent in England) whose main exponents had been Giovanni Verga and Luigi Capuana. Influenced by French naturalism, ‘verismo’ aimed to represent reality objectively and in its crudest aspects. This is a minor chapter in the history of ‘Faustism’ in England and an example of the mingling, on an imaginary level, between Fust and Faust (Volume 1, § 100.2): Faust, a commercial agent for Gutenberg in Paris, astounds the booksellers, who think the precision and exactness of his reproductions are the fruit of magic. Comparing Milton’s Satan with Defoe’s, Joyce described the latter as ‘a dealer in hosiery who has suffered a calamitous financial setback’: in other words, not a heroic figure, but a victim of financial failure, presented very cynically by Defoe.

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Great, the ‘knight’),4 from which it was a short step to imaginary, instead of real, characters. The fixed paradigm of Defoe’s novels is a curve that goes from childhood, or youth, to old age, and from disbelief, or indifference to the divine, weakness of will or sin, even crime, to repentance. His hero, or heroine, however, falls into no state of sterile mysticism, because there is no incompatibility between justification and worldly success, in the most concrete, economic meaning of the word. Indeed, Defoe is a perfect example of the Puritan ethic that equates economic prosperity with divine approval. The heroes of Defoe’s novels are ‘of two or three worlds’, and symbolize the England of business and the colonies. They reflect a moment of historical mobility, and are characters that reject a sedentary life in favour of a search for wealth and happiness beyond customary and pre-established solutions. A happy ending, both moral and economic, is guaranteed in his novels, with the exception of one, and here the narrator is in some way responsible. If his characters live and act on the edge of the moral code, and often cross the line, breaking religious and secular laws, it is also the fault of the labyrinthine world they inhabit. 2. One of Defoe’s achievements – and no minor one, at that – is the invention of a new prose style, or at least, the radical transformation of a pre-existing one, the work of Nashe and Deloney a century before, not forgetting Sidney and a host of other lesser novelists.5 Defoe’s novels mark the beginning of objectivity as a primary aim of the writer. He has the gift of creating simulations of a truth that has been experienced without being seen: in other words he fakes the presence of the witness at the scene, and concocts a first-hand account. He inhabits his characters, and speaks with their voice. The first instance of this technique is The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, where he assumes the figure and falsetto of an out-and-out Tory, and mimics his ideas and rhetoric so well as to be taken literally. His five novels are exercises in the impersonation of characters, both male and female, in which Defoe demonstrates an almost Browning-like skill 4 5

The not particularly exciting Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720), about an officer who fought under Gustav Adolf, and enrolled under Charles I. Defoe’s authorship of The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr Duncan Campbell is disputed. § 71.2–4.

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in capturing the nuances and idiosyncrasies of each speaker’s style. Only after the rise and fall of forms like the epistolary novel, the mock-heroic, eighteenth-century Gothic, serial and multi-plot novels of the first part of the nineteenth century, only then does Defoe’s macrotext merge with the first-person narrative that was to become popular at the end of the nineteenth century. Yet in Defoe, if there is still no sense of structural balance, this is to be seen as another aspect of his realism: the plain, simple narration aims at imitating the apparent randomness of life itself. Other things he lacks are a truly dramatic dialogue, psychological probing of characters, and a sense of situation and context. It was not these deficiencies, however, that provoked the hostility of his contemporaries and that of later critics. Pope told his first biographer that there was nothing either very bad or very good in Defoe, and Swift used to pretend he could not recall his name. Until quite recently, the general opinion of literary historians was that Defoe was something of an unprincipled rogue, who, to make matters worse, had written and published an unseemly number of works. In the twentieth century, post-war pundits found him soporific, ‘unreadable’, and even ‘depressing’, including Robinson Crusoe, which was thought better in an abridged form and without the two appendixes.6 Leavis banished him from the realm of the novel proper, and ejected him, along with every single eighteenth-century novelist, from the ‘Great Tradition’. 3. The dividing line between Defoe’s fiction and non-fiction is not always clearly visible, as the latter is often ‘recounted’ by an unidentified, fictional narrator. Fiction and non-fiction, however, interact in a way that criticism has largely ignored, also because his non-fiction constitutes a mountain of material that defies even the hardiest of critical climbers. From 1719 to 1724, Defoe was seized by a compositional fit that led to six novels, of which one of mixed genres, as will be seen. The fit passed as suddenly as it had come, and he went back to journalism, writing of social problems and travels until death removed the pen from his hand. In short, before and after, he wrote things that were clearly not novels, but that shared with his fiction the same educational, formative, exhortative agenda. In

6

Cf. Orwell in OCE, vol. II, 51.

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his novels, he sought, first of all, to redeem and reform an existing narrative genre that was morally feeble and aesthetically unsatisfactory. He wished, furthermore, to re-write the fashionable, ambiguous denunciations/ exaltations of hardened highwaymen and the like. He played the card of travel literature, and of accounts of pirates, adventurers and explorers who founded colonies. Once he had decided his field of action, he made short work of his rivals. After his narrative phase he reverted to handbooks, histories, vademecums, and registers, but, as always, in the role of an educatorcum-entertainer, who, with his portraits of contemporary cult figures – the rogue, the adventurer, the explorer, the entrepreneur – proposes to forge strong, honest citizens for civil society. So, his novels can be seen as embryos of the Bildungsroman. Defoe builds his novel on a semi-total biographical arc, starting from the childhood, or even infancy, of characters who grow up in a continuous state of emergency, and are often foundlings, or changelings, and turn into drifters destined to become criminals, but always possessing a hidden capacity for redemption. The remedy for juvenile delinquency is the same as in Dickens’s reformism a century later: a home that shelters and educates. Defoe’s creative writing, that is to say, his indirect writing, is a small island in an ocean of incidental, sometimes patriotic, journalism on a variety of subjects, including the ‘complete English gentleman’ (1727), the equally ‘complete tradesman’; and of course, in 1701, William of Orange had been saluted as a ‘true-born Englishman’. At this point, it must be remembered that Defoe had been meant to become a minister of the Presbyterian church; he did not, but never abandoned the ideals of his religious upbringing, as Virginia Woolf recognized: ‘Defoe is the last writer to be guilty of bald preaching’. It is in his realism that his Dissenting background is most obvious. Defoe had to be a realist because his Puritan aesthetics and conscience disapproved of pure imagination. So his style is neutral, almost zero degrees on the thermometer of literariness, unrhetorical, taxonomic, spare and sober; he may also have been influenced by the recommendations of the Royal Society’s Bishop Sprat, advocating the use of a style of ‘mathematical plainness’.7 The still ongoing critical debate

7

Watt 1977, 113.

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concerns the harmonic integration as against the total diversity of two codes identifiable as the ‘economistic’ and the ‘spiritualistic’. Ian Watt explicitly supposed that Robinson has no time for providence, and that the ‘actual effect’ of his religion is ‘curiously little’.8 Admittedly, it is difficult to reconcile a practical view of trade and capitalism, as openly advertised in his journalism, with the traditional objectives of biblical wisdom and Christian ethics communicated at the end of Defoe’s novels. After Watt, a number of critics embraced the idea of Defoe as the novelist of the homo oeconomicus, to be read in conjunction with Marx and Max Weber. There is, they said, a residue of Puritanism in Defoe, but it is by now secularized, and this makes him quite different to Bunyan. An opposing school of thought put forward an existentialist-autobiographical interpretation, seeing Robinson and the other protagonists of his novels as victims of poverty and social injustice. Such contradictory reactions to the same texts can be explained in two ways: one ecdotic – Defoe was not in fact the author of many of the works attributed to him, and his bibliography should be examined afresh;9 the other, deconstructionist ante litteram, with the help of narratology, argues that Defoe is a kind of Jekyll and Hyde, who exploits to the full the resources of first-person narration: it is always a character, by now old, who begins telling his story from his birth, going through his life events, and re-ascribing to himself intentions, objectives and, above all, words. Onto this ex post revision is superimposed the voice of the extradiegetic narrator, who has to bring into play his constructions, reconstructions and deconstructions; and then, finally, there is the narrator that appears on the frontispiece, who influences the two internal ‘I’s.10

8 9 10

Watt 1977, 89. Cf. P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe, New Haven, CT and London 1988. The dialectic between the narrating ‘I’ and the narrated ‘I’ is discussed with great subtlety by G. Sertoli in SDR.

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§ 83. Defoe II: ‘Robinson Crusoe’. Ambition, initiative and divine approval of the entrepreneur The co-existence of multiple ideological intentions in Robinson Crusoe (1719) has often been remarked on, and the unresolved contradictions of its proposals, until recently considered a defect, have been applauded by the critics of the late twentieth century, the age of deconstruction. In the past, Robinson was considered the work of an instinctive writer, who, taking on the realist agenda, shows the contradictions inherent in life and reality without attempting to smooth them over. Reality regulates the behaviour and actions of the characters, who think one thing and do something completely different, thus unwittingly betraying their ethics and values. According to this reading, any moral objective was a pretext: all Defoe aimed at was money. The fact is that Defoe, in writing the novel, altered reality, and his ‘realism’ is, therefore, a first degree fiction. Behind Robinson Crusoe is in fact the sensational story of the Scottish naval officer, Alexander Selkirk, who, in 1704, after a disagreement with his captain, was marooned on one of the islands of San Juan, off the coast of Chile, and brought back to England four years later, a mental wreck. In Defoe, the time spent on the island is expanded to twenty-eight years, but, above all, what Robinson goes through is a kind of Bildung, at the end of which, proving the truth of the expression, ‘Necessity is the mother of invention’, he will have squeezed to the utmost all his intelligence, spirit of initiative, strength of character and ability to adapt, and succeeded in making his life tolerably comfortable. He will also emerge from his experience spiritually richer, one might say regenerated, having had proof of the workings of divine providence in the world, so much so that, merging his voice with that of the nominal author, he is able to offer his readers a persuasive spiritual message. In my opinion, the first input is that Robinson Crusoe is meant to be an allegory of conversion and election. At a distance of fifty years, it is an update of Pilgrim’s Progress: both writers came from the ranks of Puritanism and Dissent, and their outlook on the world is Calvinist because the protagonist cannot rid his mind of the threat that the Devil is engaged in a fight without quarter for man’s soul; further, that God has been defeated and man is damned. The certainty of justification, and of predestination itself, is achieved, but also the assurance that all

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Robinson’s efforts, even his transgressions and defeats, are not to be seen as divine punishments, but as trials to be overcome. It implies that every man can do something towards his own salvation. The first contradiction to be resolved involves the narrating voice, which repeatedly affirms that Robinson’s life has been a long sequence of sins, disobedience and Promethean daring. To be sure, Robinson might have obtained the certainty of his justification by renouncing all challenges and a career open to the talents he possesses; instead, he chose the road of adventure. The voice within, ex post, pronounces a diagnosis that is partial or unjust. God’s voice seems to reprimand him, but, as it turns out, the bogeymen with which the presumed challenger is threatened burst like bubbles. Reality is friendlier than is believed, and if an obstacle is faced head on, it collapses on its own account. Initially, Robinson meets more good and kindly people than bad: think of the frank, honest captain, or the widow that looks after his money in London; or again, the African Robinson escapes from with a subterfuge (but whose master is a pirate). The Moors of the African coast are innocuous, and willing to barter in a civilized manner. The Portuguese captain who finds the marooned Robinson and takes him on board on the way to America is another example of honesty. On the island that is his home for so many years, nature is kind to the suspicious castaway; the animals are at first frightened, but then collaborate, as do the birds and the goats. All the difficulties Robinson encounters are so many stages of a pilgrimage, or rather, a treasure hunt dreamed up by God. His barley is the miraculous outcome of a chance gesture, and constitutes the decisive epiphany that will convert the agnostic or atheist. A series of apparent transgressions leads to conversion, and the resemblances to Bunyan multiply. The island becomes the setting for a parody of Milton: on the one hand, a virgin nature recalls the Garden of Eden; on the other, in one of the few touches of humour, instead of Eve, the new Adam is given Friday, a virtuous, kind, physically perfect version of Caliban.11 Defoe re-launches, in a more concrete form, the myth and archetype of the desert or enchanted island that had been a 11

Sexual love and women are totally absent, the reason being, according to the first Marxist critics, that Robinson replaces the sexual urge with the acquisition of material possessions. This is, obviously, a Puritan ethic.

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theme of cultural discourse from Homer to Prospero. I might add that the need for company is first satisfied by a dog, and then a parrot, which also serves as an interlocutor for Robinson, given that one of the basic necessities of the human being is to communicate with others. 2. Alone, and with time on his hands, Robinson sets off on the road to self-awareness, and, significantly, he records his progress in a diary which is, in effect, an account book, with one column for ‘good’, and another for ‘evil’. He keeps this account of his salvation for as long as his ink lasts. The diary serves not only a realistic function: it records events that have already been recounted in the narrative, but with the addition of important comments on his spiritual development, and the progress of his repentance. When he is caught out in an earthquake, he takes another step in his journey to the light, and, above all, when he falls sick, and dreams that an angel has descended to run him through with his sword. Driven by sickness, he proves to himself the existence of God. Tobacco and the Good Book heal body and soul, and, for the first time, Robinson kneels down and prays. The episode of the sudden sprouting of the barley can be seen as a version of the parable of the sower: Robinson had sown before, but without realizing, and, therefore, without reaping the rewards of his sowing. At this point the reader has already met with two parables from the Gospels: his father’s earnest injunction to Robinson to find a middle ‘station’ (note the religious undertones of the word), and to make do with small-time coastal traffic, leads to a lengthy disquisition on the interpretation of signs and dreams, and presents the dilemma of whether it is opportune, or not, to take risks; in the background is the belief that the Almighty exhorts his creatures to desist from daring. It is not in itself sinful to seek adventure for the sake of adventure, or even to try and make a fortune while braving the perils of the sea. Yet, the act of daring is branded as an ‘original sin’, a tragically ironic euphemism of the narrating voice, to whom the divine plan has not yet been revealed, or who merges, tacitly, with the narrated ‘I’.12 Strokes of luck may be fortuitous, if they are not the devil’s work, and disasters may be trials in disguise. God is mysterious 12

The dilemma is whether to go on or turn back after the first storm, itself an ordeal as in the Gospels. It might be a coincidence, but the prospected turning back would

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and inscrutable. The first parable referred to indirectly in this scene is the one of the talents, insofar as the adventurer is encouraged to make the most of what he has. The second is the parable of the prodigal son. The ex post refrain of the narrator is, as we have seen, quite clever: he rejects his former self, whom he accuses of being blind to signs sent from above, and determined not to understand that they have been sent to make him refrain from sin. He never says that they are trials which, if overcome, will be rewarded by God’s approval. For this reason, they seem to fall under the heading of a voice without an owner, unauthorized, and, literally, diabolical. A similar, successive ‘I’ hides at least a part of Robinson’s ‘I’, which is silent on the good deriving from the presumed helter-skelter race to ruin. Only much later do the two interpretations come together, and the stereophonic, or cacophonic, effect dies out. The crucial phrase of the ‘interpretation of dreams’ is this: ‘frequently, in the course of our lives, the evil which in itself we seek most to shun, and which when we are fallen into it is the most dreadful to us, is oftentime the very means or door of our deliverance’. The second, or third, contradiction is that Robinson’s conversion in no way is seen as incompatible with his astuteness, businesssense, and his desire to make money (which he does). It is, not, therefore, a renunciation of the world. Of course, there is a third element to be taken into account: Robinson Crusoe is a book that was written to be sold, and skilfully mixes the marvels of romance literature with the fascination of a journey to exotic lands. 3. Robinson Crusoe, like the other novels by Defoe, is not divided into chapters or parts but is an uninterrupted flow of recollections by a firstperson narrator. Its style, however, is much more unstable than appears at first sight, or than it is said to be. Its division into three parts is that of a fast-moving prologue followed by a stasis, followed, in turn, by another acceleration. The narrative pace varies much and not always for the best. It may be analytical, meticulous, lingering, always a little arid, but subject to sudden changes of speed, and unexpected visionary visitations, like the

mean returning to Hull, which sounds very much like ‘Hell’: damnation instead of election, then.

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marvellous leopards and sea lions seen as Robinson coasts the shores of Africa, or the cat, the birds, parrot and goats on the island. His descriptions of manual work, and the building of artefacts, are precise, and characterized by an almost maniacal attention to detail: Defoe is the first bricoleur of the literary annals. His greatest gift is understatement. The human footprint on the sand is announced quietly, and explained by the narrating voice as an apparition, similar to that of the ghost of Mrs Veal in the reportage of 1706. Robinson sees it as a sign, obviously, from the devil – the footprint is not, however, that of a cloven hoof but of a perfectly formed human foot. The savage submits spontaneously, but Robinson is quick to establish that he, the savage, is a slave, and Robinson his master. The sense of possession and the taste for command become even more pronounced with the arrival of Friday’s father and the Spaniard saved from the cannibals. At this point Robinson considers himself lord of the island, and a legislator legitimized by having saved the lives of his subjects. Gradually, he discovers that this is, for him, the best of all possible worlds. The replication on a reduced scale of civilized life is extended to the sphere of justice, when Robinson takes punitive measures against the birds that are guilty of stealing his corn seeds, the equivalent of thieves in ‘civilized’ society. The whole reflection on the life of the savages ends with opinions and postulates of a decidedly Illuminist nature. Faced by the remains of the cannibals’ feast, Robinson at first recoils in horror and disgust at what he judges to be a ‘degeneracy of human nature’, then he decides to lay an ambush for the savages, spurred on by a desire to punish and destroy. With time, he relents, and realizes he has no right to kill them; he is not God. Furthermore, what for him is a crime, is not so for them, according to their conscience. He concludes that the savages lack the will and awareness to sin. It is wrong to condemn them, or attempt to exterminate them either ‘in principle’ or ‘in policy’. Friday helps Robinson to discover the invariability of human nature that co-exists with the infinite variety of levels of evolution and civilization. In fact, he is persuaded that the savages, if they had had the privileges of Revelation and civilization, would have made far better use of it than the world he has left behind. The Illuminist framework is visible in the parody of argumentation based on mistaken syllogisms, or applying mental grids and automatic preconceptions. Another Illuminist element is Robinson’s

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contextualization and historicization of the life of the savages: like a rudimental anthropologist he reconstructs their religion, and, in so doing, lays bare the organization of the historical religions. The savages, too, have a priestly caste that acts as intermediary between man and God, and is the keeper of a ‘secret of religion’ the purpose of which is to preserve intact its own privileges and power over the faithful. As a Presbyterian, Robinson rejects all hierarchical organization, and all splitting of theological hairs; his guiding light is the word of God. When Friday asks why God, as he is almighty, does not eliminate the devil, this is to underline that only divine revelation can provide the answers where the ‘mere notions of nature’ fall short, and lead the way to Christ and Redemption. When Robinson is no longer alone and new inhabitants begin to arrive on the island, a kind of social contract is stipulated ex novo. In the tiny kingdom that has just been formed, tolerance is the norm: there are three religions – Friday is a Protestant, like Robinson, Friday’s father is a cannibal and pagan, and the Spaniard is a Papist. Robinson grants freedom of worship to all three. He thinks twice, however, before deciding to escape from the island with the fellow-countrymen of the Spaniard he has saved from the cannibals, because he fears he will end up their prisoner, and fall into ‘the merciless claws of the priests, and be carried into the Inquisition’. To avoid this, he would almost prefer the cannibals. In the end, the Spaniard turns out to be trustworthy, perhaps because he is desperate and worn out; but nonetheless, there is an element of anti-Catholicism in Defoe when he makes Robinson, who by now is safely back in England, decide not to return to Brazil so that he will not be forced to convert to Catholicism. 4. The ‘further adventures’ of Crusoe, written and published a few months after the appearance of the first Robinson Crusoe (1719) to exploit its success, begin with Robinson back in England, married and with children. He has bought a plot of land and has become a country gentleman. But, restless and unhappy, he decides to go to sea again, giving in to the unceasing call of adventure. Wishing to find an allegorical substratum, one might see in Robinson’s initial quandary an allusion to Christ’s invitation to his followers and fishermen, who leave, not the plough, as in Crusoe’s case, but their nets, to follow their master. Robinson returns to ‘his’ island, and learns what has happened in his absence. He issues decrees and measures for the

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defence of the little community, in which the three Englishmen distinguish themselves for their lack of discipline and their propensity for mischief. An army is formed to fight off possible invasions by the cannibals. At the end of his ‘pastoral’ visit, Robinson leaves the island, but his ship is attacked by cannibals, and during the fray Friday is mortally wounded. There follow ten years of wandering, from Madagascar to China, then westward to Russia, Germany and, at last, England and home. Although Robinson gives up his wandering because of his age, the conflict persists between the codes that clashed in the first part. The Serious Reflections (1720) are a collection of maxims containing an explicit parabolic and anagogic interpretation of Robinson’s adventures that confirms the spiritual reading, albeit without excluding the ambiguity of the first adventures. The unification of the two voices is achieved in the works that follow his cycle of novels. § 84. Defoe III: ‘Captain Singleton’ Written in 1720, Captain Singleton, like Crusoe, was based on a real-life character, one Captain Avery, a corsair of the coast of Madagascar, who had also traversed the ‘dark’ continent that exerted such fascination at the time. The story, as told by Defoe, never really takes off, and remains a detailed account of events that fails to arouse much interest, save for one or two sporadic moments. The captain’s recollections begin with his infancy: he is abandoned and sold, entrusted to the care of the parish, and, after various adventures, he becomes the servant of an old sailor in Lisbon. Without insisting too much on it, Defoe brings up the great social problem of abandoned children, who are at the mercy of the institutions that take them in, and all too often turn to crime because of the lack of suitable education. Captain Singleton is the first of a series of pirates and criminals acquitted of crimes they have not committed, who drift on, unwittingly, towards a final change of heart. In the first of the two parts, a group of mutineers, among whom Singleton, are put ashore on the coast of Madagascar. Crusoe is repeated here, with the initial exploration of the territory, the decision to organize an economy that is different to that of the civilized world, and based on a different set of values. The mutineers capture a ‘black prince’ and move further inland, coming into contact with various tribes, some of them friendly, others warlike. Soon the little community feels the need of

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a leader and guide, who is elected democratically. Singleton is Robinson’s double, although he has no moral scruples or religious principles. He is a colonizer, explorer and governor, born to command. With his little band of brothers he crosses the continent and does all the things that Robinson does, single-handedly, on his island: he keeps slaves, makes decisions, works things out, gives orders. The black prince, who accompanies him, is an updated Friday, collaborative and intelligent. After his return to England, in the second part, which is much more chaotic, Singleton goes to sea again with the Quaker, William Walters, a non-practising pirate, who acts as a catalyst for the conversion of the unbelieving protagonist. Once he has been converted, Singleton marries Walters’s sister and gives up piracy, after a series of fierce debates that rekindle faith in him, who previously had never been particularly religious. § 85. Defoe IV: ‘Moll Flanders’. Moral balancing acts in a monetized society Mary Frith, also known as Mal Cutpurse, had been the inspiration of Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl; her memoirs, published in 1662, were expanded by Defoe and became Moll Flanders (1721–1722). By the very nature of its plot, Robinson lacks co-protagonists and secondary figures. It is monological. Moll Flanders is more crowded and lively, and alternates between first-person memoir narrative and long sections of direct speech. There are no descriptions of natural landscapes, or of personal appearances, no character analysis or incidental situations, and no authorial instructions of any kind. Defoe employs the form of memoir that consists of a continuous flow of information, though there are clear divisions into successive blocks of narrative according to the various stages of existence. Once again, however, there are no chapters or sections.13 This, too, is an autobiography 13

A flow, then, though not of consciousness. If we add the contradictions, and a mixture of ingenuous eroticism, religion, and desire for profit, it is not impossible that Joyce may have modelled his ‘Molly’ on Defoe’s ‘Moll’: an autobiography on the one hand, an interior monologue on the other. M. Shorer, in Byrd 1976, 126, makes a list of writers influenced by Defoe’s prose, and includes Lawrence and Hemingway, but not Joyce.

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that begins with the birth of the heroine and continues up to her old age. The narrating voice is one that has been tested in, and knows how to use, certain technical idiosyncrasies. It proceeds slowly, at a snail’s pace, with sudden variations in the distribution of the importance and hierarchy of events. Rigorous mimesis entails a slow-burning narration, that dulls the text and the reader with it. Routine events are dealt with at extreme length, and analysed beyond necessity; others are under-narrated, hurriedly got rid of, even if they are clearly of considerable emotional relevance, such as the exceptional compression of five years of marriage to ‘the younger brother’ into a short sentence, as if wiped out altogether. More than usually restrained, Moll Flanders presents fewer examples of surreal visions than Robinson, but there is one worth recalling: in Virginia, Moll’s mother shows her the brand on her palm, the symbol of her crime and punishment; it ties in, somehow, with the footprint on the sand on Robinson’s island. The plot-line is as untidy as life itself, though there are coincidences and repetitions. Defoe, however, is no draughtsman laying out perfectly geometrical reconstructions of reality. The essential lines of action are two: Moll as a hunter of husbands, and Moll as a hunter of jewels and money, in other words, a thief. She was born in Newgate, and, like little Dorrit, is a ‘daughter of the prison’; she gets out of prison, returns to it, and finally emerges once again into freedom. She goes to America a first time, then is deported; during her first stay in the New World she finds her mother after marrying her (the mother’s) son. She is thus guilty of unintentional incest. The second time, she has to reveal to her second husband that she has been married to her brother. 2. The preface presents the old problem of the moral justification for recounting the reprehensible acts and careers of unrepentant rogues; the author always claims to have a moral and didactic intent. Moll Flanders, for a start, breaks religious and ethical codes, while Robinson commits no real crimes. Unlike in Robinson, Defoe announces, right from the preface, that he is an intermediary, and that the story he is about to tell is the reelaboration of a much racier version, which he has toned down and made more acceptable to his readers. Nonetheless, he realizes that the ‘immoral’ parts will be much more enjoyable than the pages that tell of repentance. Moll is quite sincere when she confesses that yes, she is sorry, but adds that

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real repentance can only come about ‘when the power of further sinning’ has been ‘taken away’. Deathbed repentance is tardy and caused by contingencies. When she lands in Virginia, Moll once again unsheathes her cunning and moral nonchalance. She is what she was before, money-grabbing, canny, resourceful, the only difference being that she no longer steals or sells her body. In the end she is rewarded in proportion to her initiative, maybe more than she deserves at the hands of providence, which, for this very reason, she never leaves off thanking. America signifies physical removal, and the alibi for the problem of the incompatibility of entrepreneurial pragmatism with the moral code. Symptomatic of her unscrupulousness is her complete lack of love for the numerous children she has brought into the world, even though, in one case at least (but here her hypocrisy touches new heights), she preaches maternal love and inveighs against those heartless women who abandon their creatures. 3. Moll’s first justification is a monetized society, in which anyone who does not play along goes under; the only other chance of survival is in a truly transcendent philosophy and practice of unworldliness. The tempter undermines our will power by increasing our desire for gratification. Moll pursues a dream of riches and respectability in the form of a search for rich husbands, who, one after the other, turn out to be as poor as her, or are taken from her by some mishap; when her beauty has faded, she falls back on pickpocketing. Once a prisoner of Newgate and waiting to be executed, it will be the money she has put aside that will give her access to better treatment and deportation; on board ship, she is able to buy a better berth, and even, if she wants, her freedom. But it is symptomatic that the rule that poverty leads to crime should be contradicted by Moll turned thief: she steals more than she needs, driven by the demon called ‘more-and-more’. An irrepressible urge to reiterate spurs her on to more thieving even when there is no justification or extenuating circumstance: ‘when once we are hardened in crime, no fear can affect us, no example give us any warning […]. Thus, you see, having committed a crime once is a sad handle to the committing of it again; whereas all the regret and reflections wear off when the temptation renews itself ’. The novel reads like a vademecum of the eighteenth-century man who wishes to live comfortably and, if possible, enrich himself, and build a barrier against the risks and dangers that abounded in the England of the time. On many occasions, reprehensible acts (like robbing a drunken

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lord) are seen as an opportunity that must be seized; in such cases stealing becomes almost a duty. Now and again the text seems like a dual function ‘guide’: for the thief, it gives advice on the various techniques of stealing, for the victims, it offers tips on how to avoid being robbed. Stealing is approved of as a paradoxical form of entrepreneurship and ability to exploit all opportunities, but at the same time prudence and caution are recommended, and the reader is invited to learn from the various episodes of crime recounted in the story. Moll does not only solve her immediate problems, but, out of the corner of her eye, looks to future complications. In the greatest setbacks, she does not lose heart, and, instead of beating her breast and weeping and wailing, gets down to finding solutions and remedies. Even at the height of her prosperity she provides against possible future emergencies. Her indomitable spirit is clearly shown by her career as a thief: twice she narrowly escapes being caught, and thanks to her skilful use of all the tricks of the trade, actually turns the situation in her favour. In prison, together with her tireless and resourceful governess, she refuses to accept defeat, and tries in every possible way to improve her situation. § 86. Defoe V: ‘A Journal of the Plague Year’ Defoe was always ready to switch from fiction to journalism, when necessary. For A Journal of the Plague Year, published in 1722, he suspended temporarily, or alternated, the composition of his novels. The Journal was followed, in the same year, by another book in which the author recommended ‘suitable precautions against the plague and for the benefit of the body and soul’. Eighteen years earlier Defoe had demonstrated how susceptible he was to the idea of natural disasters when he published The Storm (1704), a documentary report full of statistics but also enriched by anecdotic digressions. A Journal of the Plague Year is Defoe’s greatest achievement in militant journalism, although the urgency behind it was mediated and indirect. As usual, Defoe is always constructive, never catastrophic: the state has weathered the emergency despite the fact that the king and his court have abandoned the city.14 Joyce was of the opinion that this account of the

14 Bardotti 1990, 117, who cites other contra, cases of impiety like the episode of the disbelievers in the tavern, the homicidal habits of nurses and invigilators, and other

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plague was sufficient, even without the novels, to guarantee Defoe’s place among the immortals. This permanent value derives from the fact that the urgency of the immediate situation recedes, leaving a series of unforgettable ‘photographs’ of the plague-stricken city. The problem is why, at a distance of fifty years, Defoe should have decided to revisit this memorable event, which had already been described by Dryden.15 The answer is that in 1720 plague had broken out in Marseilles, and it was feared that it might spread north and reach the shores of England. In the eyes of the believer nourished by the Bible, it was part of those cyclical phenomena that cannot be random, but must be sent, with impeccable timing, by God himself. Defoe’s virtuoso skill is such that his reconstruction of events seems to be based on some pre-existing account, while it is not, at least not to any great extent. He writes in the manner of a bureaucrat. The internal narrator signs himself H. F., which may stand for Henry Foe, Defoe’s uncle. But there was no such diary, or if there was, it was completely transformed by the writer’s imagination. The second obvious characteristic of the text is the oscillation of voice and register, the mixed, pluri-discursive form. What we read is a primordial history of the plague, complete with tables of figures and statistics. This is the language of an official report. Then the detached, impartial observer becomes a person, self-aware and self-observing, who dispenses predictions and anecdotes, sometimes with flashes of moving pathos that to an Italian reader conjure up memories of Edmondo De Amicis (the grief-stricken mother, the father that accompanies the cart carrying his dead loved ones; the carter that brings food to the infected family whom he cannot see). In his account, Defoe maintains a position of equidistance, and the tone of a cautious, balanced informer who avoids both the delirium of superstition and the frigid objectivity of atheism. He rejects the magical or miraculous origin of the plague, and follows the science of the day in ascribing it to some kind of contagion. That said, Defoe remains deeply attached to a spiritual perspective; he seems a calmer, more observant version of Ruskin, not the

15

examples of villainy, similar to those later described by Manzoni in the episode of the plague in his The Betrothed. For the sources of the Journal see W. Nicholson, The Historical Sources of Defoe’s ‘Journal of the Plague Year’, Boston, MA 1919 and later editions.

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delirious, prophetic, visionary author of The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century. The plague has been sent by God, or, at least, God has allowed it; but He has also commanded it to cease. So He is both the cause and the remedy. This disaster is a clear sign, for Defoe, that there is good to be found in even the most terrible afflictions, and this is echoed in most of his other works, together with the exhortation to react vigorously to misfortune by rolling up one’s metaphorical sleeves, as Robinson did his literal ones. After all, the plague is a shipwreck on dry land, and the castaways must pick up the pieces and start all over again. The plague has caused death and destruction, but has also revived a sense of community and mutual aid.16 Once it has been beaten, it is a question of ‘Business as usual’. § 87. Defoe VI: ‘Colonel Jack’ Various ingredients from the previous works were used again by Defoe in Colonel Jack (1722), the first part of which is engaging and jolly, but gradually bogged down in a series of adventures that lack Defoe’s most conspicuous quality: a sense of truth and inevitability. The subject, once again, is the formation of a gentleman, which in the course of a long life might well have been achieved sooner. Like other protagonists in Defoe, the hero has no recollection of his parents, and was brought up by a wellpaid woman who dies when he is twelve. He becomes a thief, thrust into a life of crime by his two half-brothers, who bear the same Christian name but differ in their military rank (perhaps to show a different use of the same talents). The first pages linger on the story of the abandoned child, the disoriented thief son malgré, and look ahead to Oliver Twist. Defoe criticizes Moll Flanders for her impure thoughts, and has Robinson reflect that the immorality of cannibalism depends on the culture in which human flesh is consumed. In the same way Jack’s crimes are justified because he does not know what he is doing. In order to commit a crime, it is necessary to be aware that what one is doing is indeed a crime, and against this or that particular law. Every time he steals, Jack feels remorse and the need to 16

As is proved, during the plague, by the separate episode and self-contained anecdote of ‘the three brothers and their partner’, who institute a miniature community in the wood and begin reconstruction.

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repent, which compel him to give back the money he has stolen. The boy harbours an innate, but confused, feeling that one day he will become the gentleman he knows he was born to be. He goes astray, but not without the protests of his conscience. His initiation to crime is punctuated by anecdotes that go some way to salvaging the quite lacklustre plot. A cattle merchant is robbed while he is in the throes of a coughing fit. Jack hides the booty of another theft in a hole in a tree trunk, but it slips out of his hand and he thinks he has lost it, only to find that it has come out the other side. He decides to give up stealing, and joins the army as a private; until he manages to gain a commission, emigrates to Virginia, and is employed as assistant to a plantation owner, whose slaves are always threatened with punishment but always pardoned, the threat being merely a stratagem to make them work. One of the workers on the plantation gives him his first lessons in Latin, history and religion. Like Robinson, Jack discovers the Bible thanks to this deported criminal from Bristol. Before his final redemption, more adventures await: after divorcing his alcoholic wife, Jack sets off on his travels, and finds himself caught up on the wrong side of the war, that of the French and the Old Pretender. These adventures are lived through with apathy and well-intentioned mistakes – necessary stages on his journey of self-discovery. Colonel Jack is the only novel by Defoe with intermittent comic effects, especially when the ingenuousness of the hero is beyond doubt, as when he goes to France to ape the fine manners there; and he promptly falls into the hands of ladies on the lookout for an advantageous match. This string of faux pas is observed by the author with sparkling eye and half a smile. Defoe comes on stage to fuel the argument against duels of honour, which are in contrast with the morals of a gentleman. His military career is brought to an end, and the narrative picks up speed in a series of adventures in the Caribbean, where he becomes a pirate. In the end, there is the inevitable change of heart, and Jack begins to pen his memoirs, which turn out to be another version of Defoe’s favourite subject, the making of a gentleman, but this time in an uninspired, weary form. Will, the elderly thief, and master of three apprentice thieves, is a false gentleman thief; in this way Defoe distances himself from the current journalistic craze of the ‘the thief with kid gloves’. On the other hand, the Old World, based on false, moribund values, is contrasted with the New World of vast, virgin colonies, which represented a beckoning utopia.

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Once back in Virginia, Jack realizes, like Robinson, that he is flourishing, financially speaking; his first wife, whom he had divorced, re-appears on the scene, regenerate, repentant and pious. § 88. Defoe VII: ‘Roxana’. A more polished portrait Roxana17 (1724) might appear to be a new departure in Defoe’s fiction, given a more mature approach in narration, clearer plot-lines, and completely different objectives. As is by now his habitual method, Defoe makes use of pre-existing models of poor quality, that are kept in the background; his own version of these templates is less sensational and scandalistic, and of greater artistic value. Roxana, the last of the six novels, is more tightly constructed, and more tragic and dramatic than the others: ‘tragic’ because the mood is dark and desperate; literally ‘dramatic’ because it ends with a classic denouement involving mother and daughter, and because it presents a parallel, in its wide, symbolic action, with the classic texts of late Restoration theatre. The heroine holds sway like one of Wycherley’s characters over a world that in Defoe is described in greater detail: it is the portrait of a whole historical period, that of the Stuart court before 1688, but deliberately mingled and mixed with Georgian society (reticent and vague though the text may be on this point, it is undeniable that in 1685 Roxana would have been twelve years old). Roxana is a rake in a skirt, a collector of men, not for pleasure or lust, or not only, at least; the two prime motivations are economic necessity and female vanity. The demands of the woman interlock perfectly with the desires of the man. This is the second time Defoe has chosen a woman to be first-person narrator, and a comparison with Moll Flanders highlights the fact that in Roxana social problems are probed and examined more thoroughly and clinically. It is no coincidence that in an earlier essay ‘on projects’, Defoe had argued the need for legislation that was more protective of women and their rights. As a Whig, he might have, and would have attacked the Stuart regime and a corrupt and libertine monarch like Charles II.18 Quite openly, Defoe uses his heroine as his mouthpiece; on the first page he has her warning

17 Subheading: The Fortunate Mistress. 18 Defoe had been denouncing court corruption since 1698 in ‘The Poor Man’s Plea’.

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her ‘sisters’ not to marry fools, but to choose husbands that will enable them to have a good, stable family (a point emphasized in earlier books). Roxana works out a similar marital philosophy, and refuses, after her first negative experience, to become a slave to any husband; so she abjures marriage and becomes the mistress of a series of wealthy men. Her body is her road to riches, and the wayfarers are men who are slaves to their senses. The fault lies not entirely with her, but with the cynical and secularized system according to which life is a market, and bargains must be seized. In so doing, however, she goes from one extreme to another. As for Defoe himself, he makes a construct so finely balanced as to engage the reader in a tour de force of dissuasive decoding. It is also surprising that the memoirs are not those of a reformed sinner, but of someone who is still dazzled by luxury and in the grip of greed.19 Roxana denounces, but is also denounced, and denounces herself. She diagnoses her own disease, but is unable to find a cure. Nor does she enjoy the good fortune extended to previous heroes of Defoe’s novels: it may seem that the reader is meant to admire her energy, lucidity and ability to survive. Wrong. Defoe glances at the card of repentance and discards it, and, like a god or demi-god, judges and condemns his creature. So the last link in the chain is missing: repentance, rehabilitation, economic prosperity and tranquillity. Most critics marvel at the fact that Defoe leaves Roxana unrepentant, caught up as she is in the mighty maelstrom of necessity. In reality, it all adds up: from a Puritan point of view, God and the Devil fight to the bitter end for man’s soul, so, in the end there must be winners and losers, the damned and the elect. Roxana is religious, if only because she tells herself that evil is at work to lead her into temptation. This demonstration is equivalent to admitting that the last-minute rehabilitation and ‘justification’ of Defoe’s previous sinners and rakes – Singleton, Colonel Jack, Moll Flanders – was, in fact, too mechanical and simplistic. Defoe has progressed to true realism and ‘art for art’s sake’, which does not brook arguments or texts in favour of pre-constituted conclusions, but presents life as it really is. 19

Defoe criticized luxury, but did so ambiguously: it should be regulated and taxed, but not repressed, as it was good for the economy. In his opinion on this point, Defoe is not too distant from Mandeville (Novak 1976, 136–9).

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2. Roxana, a French Huguenot émigrée, who has been abandoned, together with her five children, by her jeweller husband, realizes that her beauty can lift her out of poverty. She is not one of those ‘innocent fools’ who steal and commit other crimes without fully realizing what they are doing. She lives openly in a state of sin, branded with a ‘double stain’. Her seduction by her landlord marks the beginning of a life of programmatic dissoluteness, and an antithesis that does not envisage synthesis. In France, her companion is murdered, and she becomes the lover of a German count. Together they visit various places in Italy.20 She then spurns the advances of a Dutch merchant and returns to London, where, thanks to her acquired wealth, she can set up house in one of the most fashionable neighbourhoods of the capital. A ball, described in great detail, is the occasion for her to seduce the king, dressed in a luxurious Turkish costume. She is acclaimed as Roxana,21 and this pseudonym will stick. Her life seems in fact to take a turn for the better: her numerous illegitimate children are taken care of, the German count has seen the light, and Roxana accepts the proposal of the rich Dutch merchant. At a certain point she dresses up as a Quaker with the vague intention of changing her ways. A novel-style denouement might reinforce her decision, because she suspects a lady-in-waiting at the court might be the very child she abandoned as a child. As often happens in Defoe’s novels, various characters encountered in childhood or adolescence turn up again much later. In this case, the mother barricades herself in her guilt and refuses to recognize or be recognized. From this moment on, Defoe may have decided, in a kind of afterthought, not to give in to the idea of a happy ending. The daughter is eliminated, increasing Roxana’s guilt. The curtain comes down on an unusually terse phrase22 that suggests Roxana is not gerettet: ‘The blast of Heaven seemed to follow the injury done the poor girl by us both,23 and I was brought so low again that my repentance

20 Disgust at papal Rome is obviously a commonplace in English literature. 21 See Backscheider 1986, 197, for the exotic echoes of this name, frequent in contemporary dramatic and narrative literature. 22 Some critics believe it is not Defoe’s, but was written by the publisher. The debate continues. 23 Throughout the novel, Roxana avails herself of maid Amy’s services.

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seemed to be only the consequence of my misery, as my misery was of my crime’. There were many sequels after the 1743 edition, but all apocryphal. § 89. Swift* I: Anathema of the monster and pitfalls of Swiftian irony In almost three centuries, an impartial reconstruction of the life and works of Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) has been delayed and obstructed by 1

*

Prose Works, ed. H. Davis, 15 vols, Oxford 1939–1964, repr. Princeton 1964–1968. Poems, ed. H. Davis, 3 vols, Oxford 1958. Collected Poems, ed. J. Horrell, London 1958; Complete Poems, ed. P. Rogers, Harmondsworth 1983. Journal to Stella, ed. H. Williams, Oxford 1948. The Correspondence, ed. H. Williams, 5 vols, Oxford 1963–1965. Life. C. Van Doren, Swift, London 1931; J. M. Murray, Jonathan Swift, London 1954; I. Ehrenpreis, Swift: The Man, His Work, and the Age, 3 vols, Cambridge, MA 1962–1983; D. Nokes, Jonathan Swift, A Hypocrite Reversed: A Critical Biography, Oxford 1985, 1987; J. McMinn, Jonathan Swift: A Literary Life, Basingstoke 1991; V. Glendinning, Jonathan Swift, London 1998; D. Oakleaf, A Political Biography of Jonathan Swift, London 2008; L. Damrosch, Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World, New Haven, CT 2013. Criticism. W. A. Eddy, ‘Gulliver’s Travels’: A Critical Study, Princeton, NJ and London 1923; E. Pons, Swift: les années de jeunesse et le ‘Conte du Tonneau’, Strasbourg 1925; R. Quintana, The Mind and Art of Jonathan Swift, London and New York 1936, and Swift: An Introduction, Oxford 1955, 1962, 1965, 1966; B. Newman, Jonathan Swift, London 1937; J. F. Ross, Swift and Defoe: A Study in Relationship, Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles 1941; A. E. Case, Four Essays on ‘Gulliver’s Travels’, Princeton, NJ 1945; H. Davis, The Satire of Jonathan Swift, New York 1947; M. K. Starkman, Swift’s Satire on Learning in ‘The Tale of a Tub’, Princeton, NJ 1950; J. M. Bullitt, Jonathan Swift and the Anatomy of Satire, Cambridge, MA 1953; M. Price, Swift’s Rhetorical Art: A Study in Structure and Meaning, New Haven, CT 1953; W. B. Ewald, The Masks of Jonathan Swift, Oxford 1954; L. A. Landa, Swift and the Church of Ireland, Oxford 1954; M. Foot, The Pen and the Sword: Jonathan Swift and the Power of the Press, London 1957 and 2009; I. Ehrenpreis, The Personality of Jonathan Swift, London 1958; K. Williams, Swift and the Age of Compromise, Lawrence, KS and London 1958; R. C. Elliot, The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art, Princeton, NJ 1960; R. Paulson, Theme and Structure in Swift’s ‘Tale of a Tub’, New Haven, CT 1960; P. Harth, Swift and Anglican Rationalism: The Religious Background of ‘A Tale of a Tub’, Chicago, IL 1961; E. W. Rosenhaim, Swift and the Satirist’s Art, Chicago, IL 1963; H. J. Davis, Jonathan Swift: Essays on His Satire and Other Studies, New York 1964; Swift: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. E. Tuveson, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1964; R. I. Cook, Jonathan Swift as a Tory Pamphleteer, Seattle, WA 1967; R. Hunting, Swift, Boston,

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certain very obvious mistakes and misunderstandings, or at least by superficial, sometimes downright erroneous impressions and prejudices linked to the sensibility and literary modes of later ages – Romantic mythmaking, the Victorian aesthetic of decorum, psychoanalysis in the early twentieth century, the reduction of Gulliver to the status of a children’s classic, and, last of all, deconstruction, poststructuralism and Bakhtinism at the end of the twentieth century. The Swiftian work par excellence, Gulliver’s Travels, translated into numberless languages and immensely popular, probably struck the reader of 1750, or thereabouts, as the work of some ancient Titan, riddled with complexes and suppurating sores, whose psyche is lit up by

MA 1967; The World of Jonathan Swift, ed. B. Vickers, Oxford 1968; D. Donoghue, Jonathan Swift: A Critical Introduction, Cambridge 1969, and, as editor, Jonathan Swift: A Critical Anthology, Harmondsworth 1971; J. R. Clark, Form and Frenzy in Swift’s ‘Tale of a Tub’, Ithaca, NY 1970; C. Pagetti, La fortuna di Swift in Italia, Bari 1971; C. Rawson, Gulliver and the Gentle Reader: Studies in Swift and Our Time, London 1973; A. Brilli, Swift o dell’anatomia, Firenze 1974 (attentively reviewed by M. Praz in SSI, vol. II, 123–7), and ‘Swift e la satira’, in MAR, vol. II, 200–18; A. N. Jeffares, Jonathan Swift, London 1976; L. K. Barnett, Swift’s Poetic Worlds, Newark, DE 1981; C. Fabricant, Swift’s Landscape, Baltimore, MD and London 1982; A. Graziano, Il linguaggio dell’ironia. Saggio sui ‘Gulliver’s Travels, Roma 1982; G. Brunetti, Figure swiftiane, Firenze 1984; J. A. Downie, Jonathan Swift: Political Writer, London 1984; Essential Articles for the Study of Jonathan Swift’s Poetry, ed. D. M. Vieth, Hamden, CT 1984; M. Trulli, Mondi nuovi e mondi alla rovescia: una lettura dei ‘Gulliver’s Travels’, Bari 1990; K. Craven, Jonathan Swift and the Millennium of Madness, Leiden and New York 1992; I. Higgins, Jonathan Swift, Tavistock 1994; Walking Naboth’s Vineyard: New Studies of Swift, ed. C. Fox and B. Tooley, Notre Dame, IN 1995; R. Mahony, Jonathan Swift: The Irish Identity, New Haven, CT and London 1995; A. D. Chalmers, Jonathan Swift and the Burden of the Future, Newark, DE 1999; F. Boyle, Swift as Nemesis: Modernity and Its Satirist, Stanford, CA 2000; A. C. Kelly, Jonathan Swift and Popular Culture Myth, Media and the Man, New York 2002; CRHE, ed. K. Williams, London 2002; The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift, ed. C. Fox, Cambridge 2003; The Reception of Jonathan Swift in Europe, ed. J. J. Real, London and New York 2005; J. J. L. Barnett, Jonathan Swift in the Company of Women, Oxford 2007; Jonathan Swift and the Eighteenth-Century Book, ed. P. Bullard and J. McLaverty, Cambridge 2013; R. Capoferro, Leggere Swift, Roma 2013; G. Sertoli, four essays, bearing different dates, on the poetry, Drapier’s Letters and Gulliver, collected and revised in SDR, 83–172.

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flashes of eccentricity, not to say madness. This is true particularly of the famous fourth Part. Scott could not forgive Swift for laying bare the worst impulses of human nature; Thackeray insulted him roundly in The English Humourists; Macaulay and Jeffrey were far from impressed. Taine, however, drew the nostalgic portrait of a frustrated Tamburlaine, at war with everyone and everything, perhaps really fighting his own demons (Swift, Taine claimed, was in the throes of a terrible secret, which he revealed only to Archbishop King). After the First World War, Swift was, for a brief period, held up as the typical ‘unbalanced rebel’.1 In him, literary psychoanalysis found the ideal patient, ‘a neurotic who exhibited psychosexual infantilism, with a particular showing of coprophilia, associated with misogyny, misanthropy, mysophilia and mysophobia’.2 At the age of fifty, Swift confided to the poet, Young, pointing to an elm whose highest branches were dry and withered: ‘I shall be like that tree; I shall die from the top’. He lived the last five years of his life in a state of semi-infirmity, dictated the words to be written on his gravestone, and expressed the wish that the money he left should be used to found a hospital for the mentally sick (the asylum symbolized the society he had tried all his life to ‘heal’: in this equation, of course, Swift is completely sane). Psychoanalytical criticism in its infancy crudely identified Swift as a patient to be analysed; more refined versions of this approach saw Swift, on the contrary, as the analyst. According to the classic 1959 study by N. O. Brown,3 Swift anticipated Freud by bringing out into the open and denouncing the neurosis of his day. Swift’s excremental vision signifies that faeces – symbolizing, at the anal stage, gifts, possessions, offensive weapons – are sublimated at the end of that stage, and are transformed into an inordinate desire for money and other aggressive instincts. 2. More or less at the same time, critical theory was shifting towards issues that were embryonically semiotic: Swift was seen as wearing a variety of masks, and, in Gulliver, as availing himself of the wide margins of ‘indirection’ and of equally abundant supplies of obliqueness that are prerogatives of 1 2 3

Tuveson 1964, 3. B. Karpman, quoted in Tuveson 1964, 34. N. O. Brown, ‘The Excremental Vision’, in Life Against Death, Connecticut 1959, a chapter reprinted in Tuveson 1964, 31–54.

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first-person narration. All of a sudden, his irony became the centre of critical interest, an irony so sharp, with so many different blades, that it soon was possible, and still is, to hold, and to attribute to the author, a multiplicity of mutually contradictory opinions. This is why many critical works refer to a mysterious, largely imaginary dividing line between two Swifts, one straightforward and unambiguous, the other mocking, sibylline, sardonic, and slippery. When almost every critic repeats in limine that ‘Gulliver is not Swift’, this constitutes an excusatio non petita, as if confessing a previous mistake. On the other hand, the odd isolated, but authoritative voice, like that of Denis Donoghue,4 dissociates itself, and warns against applying to Swift categories that are more suited to Flaubert or Henry James, or taking for ironic statements that are anything but ironic. These, it must be admitted, are valid points. Similar reservations have been expressed regarding Orwell’s brilliant political reading of Gulliver, in which Swift is presented according to parameters inexistent in Swift’s day, as a reactionary, indeed a fascist, who, like Tolstoy, hid his authoritarianism behind a cloak of anarchism, and invoked measures similar to those of the self-righteous Catholics of his era, concluding that ‘he cannot be labelled “left”’. Now, irony, in order to be understood as such, must necessarily refer to a clear reference axis that is not ironic: but this is precisely the problem with Swift, that the non-ironic texts that should constitute this axis are not convincing, but create a process ad infinitum of ironized irony or ‘irony squared’. Along the same lines, Bakhtinian polyphony has discovered a Swift who is a spectator, who speaks through masks with which he identifies and does not identify, correcting or disowning the prejudices expressed by them, in a relativistic vortex more confusing than anything even in Browning – though Swift, like Browning, has his hand firmly on the tiller. 3. As for Swift’s mental illness in a strictly clinical sense, it was found to be a benign, intermittent syndrome, technically speaking a labyrinthitis, contracted when he was young, which, according to Johnson, became manifest – wait for it! – after an attack of indigestion caused ‘by eating too much fruit’.5 The theory, generally believed, that Swift was a psychopath 4 5

Donoghue 1969, 1–2. JLI, vol. II, 186.

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has been definitively put to rest thanks to his most authoritative biographer, Ehrenpreis: he was clinically sane, so sane as to point to his fellow men as madmen (see the surreal, grotesque donation to found a mental asylum). Yet, he was affected by manias, phobias, uncontrolled and illogical behaviour, hallucinations on a daily basis and much more accentuated than the average. Many writers, not only English, have, quietly and discreetly, walked quite near the precipice of madness. Swift has in fact been studied together with another so-called ‘sane’ writer like Lewis Carroll,6 though he reminds one more of Ruskin, who also suffered from a deep malaise rooted in childhood and adolescence. Both his parents were English but Swift was born a posthumous child in Ireland where his father was part of the entourage of his brother, attorney to the king; abandoned by his mother (a distant relative of the wife of Sir William Temple, Dorothy Osborne, and niece of Dryden’s grandfather), he was brought up by his uncle. The resulting emotional traumas were aggravated by his experiences at school and university in Ireland, where his educational record was, inevitably, given the situation, not outstanding. He returned to England and became secretary to Temple, who by now had retired to Moor Park. At the age of twenty, he was proud, touchy, and hypersensitive, while he necessarily had to pretend to be humble and remissive. He felt himself to be an exile, a homeless orphan, with an undefined national, geographical and emotional identity. He rebelled, too, at the thought of being maintained by others. He may have discovered, or at least suspected, that he might have been Temple’s half-brother, and was, as such, not receiving the attention he was due. Disappointed by empty promises of some prestigious political position on Temple’s recommendation, he ended up by accepting ordination as an Anglican clergyman. One cannot help questioning the sincerity of this step. In any case, he did not have the career success he might have wished: first he was given a small living in an out-of-the-way parish in Ireland; then, in a bid for a bishopric, which he never obtained, he accepted the position of dean of St Patrick’s in Dublin (1713), which he considered a sinecure that marked the end of his hopes of any further 6

In P. Greenacre’s Swift and Carroll: A Psychoanalytic Study of Two Lives, New York 1955.

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steps in his career. He performed his duties conscientiously, but without enthusiasm. He was obviously allowed considerable freedom, because he often resided in London, until 1714, taking an active part in political life, first in the Whig camp, with Addison and Steele, then with the Tories.7 As an old man, he was miserly, abrasive to his servants, and angry with people in general, though not his friends. Because of problems with his eyesight, he gradually stopped reading because he refused to wear spectacles. Some reference must be made to his relationships with women: in 1699, Swift gave himself seventeen commandments, among which were injunctions not to marry a young woman (read ‘sexually active’), not to take a liking to children (see A Modest Proposal ), and not to even imagine he could be loved by a young woman.8 In 1700 he courted an Irish woman by the name of Miss Waring, but ended up by writing her what was, in fact, a termination of his courtship disguised as a series of unacceptable requests. Swift has always been rumoured to have been, like Ruskin, impotent, and, like Ruskin, to have had various affairs at the same time, obviously Platonic, with young objects of attention to whom he gave mythological names, or diminutives, or names that rang with passion and nobility, like Stella (from Sidney), or Vanessa, or Varina.9 4. Any discussion of Swift’s irony must begin with his inherent contradictions, which are the intellectual version, and the deconstruction, of irony itself as a linguistic phenomenon. At heart, Swift was always a Whig; but he was also a clergyman, indeed, the Dean of St Patrick’s; he believed in the overall message of the Church, but was sceptical about many of its dogmas. Politically, he was a liberal, but at the same time he was an ‘illiberal’. He watched as society slipped into anarchy but advocated

7

8 9

Officially, Swift had always been a robust defender of the Anglican Church ever since the Whigs attempted to abolish the Test Act, which obliged Nonconformists to swear allegiance to that body. They were allowed to hold public office in exchange for receiving communion once a year. An advisor to the government until 1714, Swift edited the Whig Examiner. The four years from 1710 to 1714 represent the heyday of his reputation. Jeffares 1976, 8. On these Swiftian romances see below, § 94.

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its reconstruction by means of a regime of prohibitions. In his pamphlets, he argues that some phenomena of corruption and immorality should be opposed and eliminated, but also that other forms and conventions should be, hypocritically, tolerated. In some cases he was in favour of the status quo and did everything in his power to preserve it. To hail Swift as a democrat, as we are invited to do by his epitaph, would be a mistake.10 In all fields he advocated restrictive and conservative measures, as, for example, when he proposes the creation of an academy to safeguard the purity of the English language against the attack of modernisms and other elements of mutation. An enemy of all forms of innovation, he supported conservation in the development of science (in the querelle, he came out on the side of the Ancients). So, contradictoriness is a norm in Swift, and he makes things worse by employing enigmatical mouthpieces, without giving any clear indication that they are, indeed, mouthpieces. Besides works attributed to a figurehead, many others were published anonymously. As I said above, a question arises as to the sincerity of his Anglicanism. We can ‘reconstruct’ his religion, though only on the basis of the underlying ambiguity mentioned before: Swift makes statements, but we never know how much irony colours and, indeed, undermines them. There is a general consensus that Swift was a believer, that he was conscientious and honest, and an upright and responsible member of the clergy. He even opposes Shaftesbury’s philosophy of optimism. However, religion is never at the centre of his works, and seems to be kept separate from his life. Nor does he have a providential vision of history, but sees religion, in secular terms, as a prop of the state, and particularly the state he himself imagined and desired. Were it not for this ‘political’ role, religion would be one of many popular superstitions, which he never investigates anyway. It is a measure of stability, and, in his own words, ‘much more useful than open disbelief or vice’. It is also true that Augustan religion was deistic, and yet Swift was a sworn enemy of deism; he was also an enemy of Catholicism and the Papists, while being, at the same time, a close friend of one of their number, Alexander Pope. The two men of letters might have agreed on

10

Cf. Orwell’s argument in OCE, vol. IV, 244ff. and 251.

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a lukewarm form of religion, far from the excesses of fundamentalism. If Swift had been a devout Anglican, he would have preannounced the far-off coming of the Wesleyans, or been in some way affected by the dying fire of Metaphysical and Baroque religiosity, which, instead, was one of his favourite targets. 5. Almost all Swift’s works are quite short, with themes and targets in common, and give the impression of a spreading dust-cloud. Swift is a militant polemicist, who comments on political events as they happen. Only one book is not entirely suggested by current affairs, and two others are partly so. This has led to him being called unclassifiable as a writer, one belonging more to the world of political controversy, maybe even politology and philosophy, than to literature as such (with the exception of Gulliver’s Travels). Politology and philosophy, however, will have nothing to do with him, and nothing remains but to conclude that Swift is not a real novelist, but only the author of a work of fantasy,11 whereas Defoe is the ‘archetypal’ novelist. His other proficiencies are paraliterary – a writer of letters, or a diarist. If it is thus difficult to fit Swift into a precise literary genre, it is uncontroversial to say he belongs to the family of prose satirists, as Pope belongs to that of verse satire. They even share targets of attack. In mirror-like opposition to him stands Defoe, a Scylla to his Charybdis. Swift is a little anxious about the influence of Defoe; tacitly, Gulliver is a dialectical spin-off of Robinson. Defoe believed, like Leibniz, or Dryden before him, and Pope, his contemporary, that they lived in the best of all possible worlds. Swift disagreed. Defoe held commerce in awe like another god, not at all vengeful, who hid from man his vast concessions and lines of credit. He was an optimist. Swift, instead, no longer believed in the ability of human beings to create order in the world, try as he might to imagine a degree of reconstruction. For Swift, the world is moving, not forwards, but backwards. Defoe contributed nothing to the querelle of the Ancients and Moderns. If he had, he would have taken the side of the Moderns. Of course, both Defoe and Swift were, in some measure, turncoats and changed their political allegiance: Swift was a Whig who

11

AEN, 42.

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became a Tory, just as Defoe was a Tory turned Whig. However, when accused by the Whigs of betraying the cause, Swift rebutted by saying that they were the traitors, and he was still an ‘old Whig’. They were linked by a fascination with projects, concrete and feasible in one case, chimerical and absurd in the other. Defoe’s Shortest Way with the Dissenters is Swiftian, while it would be impossible to attribute the Modest Proposal to Defoe, even by mistake. Defoe convinces the reader that everything is real; Swift defamiliarizes realism and practises a systematic Verfremdung, so much so that a bishop exclaimed of Gulliver (which everyone believed was about real facts) that is was full of nonsense and unbelievable things. Swift does not censure, but puts on open display actions that are considered obscene or, rightly, unpleasant, like urinating or defecating, or the physical aspects of sex, about which, as is often noted, Defoe is completely silent. The inseparability of physical and spiritual functions, and their unbreakable bond, is a concept that runs through all of Swift’s works, from beginning to end. § 90. Swift II: Satires against ‘enthusiasm’ In 1704 Swift, as yet a mere beginner in the authorial field, defended the Ancients in the querelle in which his protector, Temple, had been routed.12 The short mock-heroic piece, The Battle of the Books, opens, however, with already two kinds of screen: in the first, the bookseller speaks, pointing out to the reader that it is the books themselves, not the authors, that must be imagined as joining in battle. The account that follows is animated and continuous, fast-moving and enjoyable; meanness and maliciousness are never far away. There is sting in the anecdote of the bee and the spider, and the description of the formation of the rival armies. It is a prose version of the rather contrived mythological fables that Dryden had just finished writing. Swift’s book, written in 1704, was, in fact, as we shall see, part of a triptych, the individual parts of which differ greatly in the form, but share

12

§ 67.

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a common theme, the abuse of ‘enthusiasm’. A Tale of a Tub13 is another battle of the books, as is clearly seen in the fifth edition, which incorporated an apparatus of semi-serious and burlesque notes (as in Pope’s second Dunciad), plus an unauthorized use of Wotton’s notes to the first edition, and a long preamble, occupying a quarter of the whole, consisting of an apology, a letter from the supposed publisher, a postscript, a dedication, an epistle ‘to posterity’, and a preface. The story of the brothers Peter, Martin and Jack is one of the gradual degeneration and splitting into sects – the three historical ones – of primitive Christianity. On his deathbed, the father gives them his testament, and a mantle for each, and sends them out into the world, where they fall into vice, and begin making changes to their mantles in a world dedicated to the idolatry of clothes. The seeds of Carlyle’s Sartor are here, in the contrast between the naked man and the one who progressively puts on more and more clothes, burying ever more deeply his natural appearance. Peter struts, asserts his superiority, dictates his rascally, crafty conditions, and his two brothers make off, scandalized, with the true copy of the testament. Jack, representing Calvin, ends by tearing his mantle when he tries to eliminate all traces of the fineries that Peter had insisted on. Martin (Lutheranism, and also Anglicanism, in part modelled on Lutheranism) opts for a middle way. Swift’s objective is to satirize the more fanatical version of Calvinism. From the very beginning, the story oscillates, with chapters full of digressions that have, in themselves, a theoretical connection with the main fable, but soon become embroiled in a whirlwind of bitter polemic against pedantry, a form of absurdity that involves all fields of knowledge and soon becomes guilty of the very faults it aims to castigate. It is difficult to see in A Tale of a Tub the consummate narrator of Gulliver’s Travels, with his terse, transparent prose, so sparing of decorative superfluities. The alternation of the two discourses is doubly counterproductive: the polemical tirades are wearying, clownish and eccentric, while the allegory of the three brothers is rough-hewn, hurried, and

13

The title refers to the custom of sailors of distracting the attention of a whale by throwing a barrel into the sea for it to play with.

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suffocated by digressions, however vivid some of them may be taken singly. As a sustained and continuous allegory, the Tale simply does not exist. Of course, this weakness is often turned upside down and becomes deafening applause, as with all cult works of art, such as the Tale. The reader is the whale, distracted and mesmerized by the barrel, that is, the digressions. 2. By 1704 Swift had already developed a maniacal interest in the three orifices of the human body, and blamed Calvin for the art of excremental externalization or flatulence. In the Tale, religious fanaticism is linked with its critical-literary counterpart – the common denominator being flatus – in the fantastical, free-moving digression on the ‘Aeolists’, the descendants of Aeolus, smooth-talking swindlers of ancient lineage, to be reborn in Joyce’s journalists in the seventh episode of Ulysses, which, to underline the point, is entitled ‘Aeolus’. A third category of Aeolists, in whom internal vapours ascend to the brain, are the megalomaniacs of history. In words and in facts, Swift stands out as a supporter of the ancient against the modern, and the laboured farrago of obscure erudition apes the Anatomy of Robert Burton. The Tale’s obscenity cost Swift an English bishopric after Queen Anne put her royal foot down. The reader cannot but sense a satire against religion tout court, not just Puritanism or fanatical Nonconformism. If  Paulson is right, and the text is genuinely religious, as he argued in 1960,14 then hundreds, if not thousands of readers throughout the centuries, have got it all wrong, and Swift himself simply missed the mark. § 91. Swift III: Paradigmatic pamphlets A third component of the 1704 book was A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, a virtual companion of which might be Peri Bathous, which ridicules the sublime as a vehicle of obscurity and lies, and attacks the contemporary lack of aesthetic taste. But Peri Bathuos was published in 1727 (though planned before), and was written by Pope,15 with whom Swift shares a spiritual affinity, especially because bathos, ambiguously, is compatible with the fundamental Swiftian swing, from high to

14 15

Paulson 1960. § 76.3 n. 24.

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low to high again, and from spiritual to excremental and up again. The Mechanical Operation is, at the same time, the first of a short series of memorable pamphlets by Swift, which constitute a safe footpath through the lava field of forty years of polemical publications. Like many others, they appeared anonymously, or passed off as the work of imaginary authors with outlandish names and roles, and introduced by a bookseller-publisher who declares he has nothing to do with the contents. The Mechanical Operation is, as regards its format, a two-part letter, containing such explosive and scandalous matter that the bearer advises the recipient to burn it after reading. The mimesis is the imminence of the postal collection: the letter must be finished as soon as possible. Another diablerie – a case of pre-Shandean shenanigans, maybe – is the use of asterisks to indicate a lacuna in the original text, or lines omitted for precautionary reasons. The Mechanical Operation argues that religious fanaticism leading to mystical ecstasy is caused by and mixed with physical and erotic urges; it is, literally, a kind of frenzy, or sexual orgasm, and can be achieved by confused self-suggestion. It is, therefore, a colossal sham. The text begins with a reference to Mahomet’s ass, which at once activates the possibility of a ‘sacrilegious’ double-entendre, since ‘ass’ is dangerously close to ‘arse’, and in some longitudes, is ‘arse’. Swift seems to suggest that one goes to heaven on a donkey but also on one’s backside, symbolizing all that is corporal. A few pages later, in seeking the origins of the sublime in the corporal, Swift recalls that, according to Plutarch, certain musical instruments were made from ass bones, referring back to the opening words of the text. Then he corrects himself: he meant to say the equivalent of the ‘os sacrum’ (‘arse bone’). Swift admits the possibility of intervention from above, but limits his research to the kind of natural enthusiasm that is procured artificially in order to anaesthetize the senses, the corruption of which leads to the generation of the spirit. He shows in detail how a minister produces spiritual excitement by means of murmurs, twitching, and squinting. Among the most effective ploys are: blowing one’s nose, clearing one’s throat, coughing – in short, expelling all the vapours we have read about in the Tale of a Tub. The holy man of Banbury has an erection, or is it a pollution (the text is unclear); hence the efficacy of communicating the spirit through the nose, another phallic symbol. The pseudoscientific deduction of fanaticism is its connection with sexual arousal:

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brain and backside are linked by means of the spinal nervous system, and ‘the Thorn in the Flesh serves for a Spur to the Spirit’. The repercussions of this state of affairs are considerable, among them the tragic jest that wars and mass killings are the result of anal fistulas or syphilis.16 2. Argument against Abolishing of Christianity (1708) reads like a more official, objective pamphlet, without the usual screens and discursive idiosyncrasies. In reality, it is highly ambiguous. The declared argument is that authentic Christianity is dead, long gone, defunct, unfashionable and unrecoverable; but the purely nominal form that has survived must be defended all the same. The latent target of irony is, in all likelihood, deism, and Swift proceeds feigning to concede victory to the free-thinkers. This is playing with fire: one might just as easily posit that true Christianity is dead and nominal Christianity survives. Maybe this is not the case, but the interpretive temptation grows proportionally to the uncertainty of the context of Swift’s reflections on religions. The opening is a masterpiece of ironic rhetoric: let it not be thought, says Swift, that, because I am against the abolition of Christianity, I wish to bring back its primitive version, which was fundamentalist and tyrannical, and which is now dead, anyway. According to Enlightenment practice, Christianity ought to adapt to the times (150 years later, Matthew Arnold was to champion this viewpoint), and admit that the injunctions of the Gospels cannot be fully implemented. It is not true, authentic Christianity that should be preserved, but the nominal brand, and this for purely political reasons. This is equivalent to admitting that society has by now become secularized. Swift always accepts a challenge, and draws quite startling consequences: if atheists had no god to insult, they would calumniate the most senior authorities in the state, and thus undermine its stability. His first move has been destructive; now he seeks reconstruction within the destruction. In the second hypothesis, the clergy ensures a healthy continuation of the race; were it to be abolished, the future sanity of the English nation would be in danger. No use objecting that without the Sabbath we would have another day to enjoy ourselves and carry on with our occupations, because everything is better on Sundays. Nor would religious discord cease, inherent as it is in human 16

A. Brilli in MAR, vol. II, 204.

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nature. At the end, we are left with the paradox that free thought might improve by attacking religion; or, rather, if Christianity were to be abolished in England, this would throw open the gates to Papism. 3. In A Modest Proposal (1729), which satirizes the bandying of statistics by political economists, the fictional writer is immune to all moral qualms or claims of feeling. He begins by expressing his sadness and suffering at the sight of the poor, famine-stricken Irish. Then he performs, or pretends to perform, an operation of pure arithmetic, reducing the starving human beings to mere numbers in an account book, on the ‘expenses’ side of the page, at that. The dignity and health of citizens is, however, protected on one condition: that a part of the population, in this case children below the age of twelve, should be sacrificed, by the rest of the population and their governors, in order to allow the remaining part of society to live a better life. It is a monstrous metaphor, put forward with poker face, of the need for birth control, including the use of contraception, and looking ahead to the days of ‘responsible parenting’. The writer of the Proposal estimates that 120,000 children are born to indigent parents every year; a quarter of these could be saved for breeding, the rest sold as a culinary delicacy. Amongst the conspicuous collateral advantages would be fewer Papists and a boost for the economy, as we would say today. Some hostile critics have read into the ‘Proposal’ Swift’s actual aversion to children, and maintain that cannibalism, when exorcized, resurfaces in an unrecognizable, evil ancient urge. A Modest Proposal is an attack on England for abandoning Ireland and giving preference to Scotland. Sixteen more pamphlets voice the paradox of a writer who hated mankind, and hated the Irish too, even though he received the accolade of ‘Irish Patriot’ from the too generous inhabitants of that island. The seven Drapier’s Letters (1724–1725), which followed a pamphlet urging the Irish to boycott English goods, were occasioned by the patent granted to an English mintmaster to coin copper halfpennies of inferior quality. This was clearly a case of corruption, since Wood obtained the patent thanks to the intervention of a duchess.17 The king  withdrew 17

The Bickerstaff Papers are an ironic put-down of astrology. Swift thought of the name when, walking through London, he saw the shop-sign of a blacksmith, one Isaac Bickerstaff. He was struck by it and stored it for future use. In the first letter,

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the licence, making this one of the few occasions on which Swift’s satire ever actually achieved anything.18 The posthumous Directions to Servants is another example of double-edged satire, because the ‘directions’ instruct servants both how to serve, and how to sabotage, their masters. § 92. Swift IV: ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ I. Travel literature revisited Re-reading Gulliver’s Travels from the viewpoint, if possible, of its contemporaries, in 1726, when it was first published (but revised and reprinted in 1735), would help us to understand on the instant many references and barbs, scattered throughout the book, that now require the aid of editors’ notes to be deciphered. Most of all, it would allow us to savour to the full the militant tang of the book, of which the first words, and the general idea, began to take shape, as far as we know, in 1720, immediately after the publication of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.19 Even without this certainty, proof of an external stimulus followed at once by a concrete response can be

18

19

he attacked the charlatan, Partridge, author of almanacs, and announced the imminent publication of his own, one of them announcing the death of the said Partridge on the 29th of that very month. When Partridge replied that he was still alive, and that, therefore, the prophecy was wrong, Swift-Bickerstaff answered with the quip that no one living would have written such nonsense as was found in Partridge’s new almanac. Essentially, the Bickerstaff Papers are yet another satire of abuses, this time the abuse of credulity represented by prophecy. Cf., in SDR, 100–14, ‘Il Decano, il Drappiere e l’Irlanda’, with a detailed reconstruction of the political context in which they appeared, and reflections on the ‘oscillation between two different identities’ (110) that correspond, more or less, to colonizer and colonized. In this essay Sertoli gives some credence to the hypothesis that the drapier’s initials, M. B., stand for Marcus Brutus, the champion of liberty in ancient Rome. Some episodes of Parts I and III can be traced back to sketches for the Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus (§ 80) and to 1714, mainly because Martinus planned to visit various foreign countries and report back on his return (cf. Quintana 1966, 22, 145–7). On echoes of Defoe’s novel in Swift see the conjectures of C. Rawson in ‘Behind the Tub’, TLS (10 September 2004, 3–4).

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found between the covers of the book. The first of Swift’s many targets is the very literary genre he appears to be practising – tales of adventure and journeys to unknown lands beyond the sea, with descriptions of wondrous flora and fauna, strange, savage customs and even stranger gods; or journeys to imaginary lands, so popular in the seventeenth century. Swift, however, distances himself from a literature of mere evasion, that aims to distract or hypnotize its readers, and ends his book by insisting that he has respected the well-known Horatian mandate, and pursued not the dulce of enjoyment, but the utile of truth. Where Defoe excels Swift is in the straightforward, effective account of sea-faring feats in all their variety; Swift, instead, pens a methodical parody of all that. He himself had never been to sea, apart from his journeys to and from Ireland. He gets his tempests and shipwrecks from books. The storm which, at the beginning of Part II, causes the shipwreck, leaving Gulliver on the island of giants, is described minutely with every possible kind of detail, and is much more ‘technical’ than Defoe; in fact, it is more like Conrad. This is not surprising, as it was taken from a contemporary nautical treatise. That Swift was no sailor is evident from the beginning of Part III, which is awkward, anonymous, halting, and stuffed with banalities. The parody stretches to the continual reference to longitude and latitude. The first point in Swift’s answer to Defoe, and, more generally, to the macrotext of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sea journeys, is the demonstration that from the basic structure of the genre a text can be produced that is technically and narratively superior. Defoe is shapeless, while Swift is shaped; Defoe’s’ raw material in Swift is structured. Four parts make up the account of Gulliver’s total travels, while Robinson is one long, uninterrupted flow. Each Part in Gulliver contains a journey with a beginning and an end, a departure from an English port and a return journey. Each Part is divided into chapters that fail to achieve distributive perfection only by one unit: 8+8+11+12; each of the thirty-nine chapters is prefaced by a summary of a few lines, a usage that will become fashionable up to Dickens and the Victorians. The first two Parts are based on optical phenomena inversely related on the duodecimal scale, and present the traveller with deformations of a predominately physical nature: the third and fourth Parts describe, mainly, deformations and malformations

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of the mind, and deteriorated relationships between body, spirit, and emotions, and, above all, between reason and instinct.20 Each of the four Parts tells of an enforced stay on an island, brought about primarily by the Robinsonian demon of the search for adventure, and, secondarily, by storms, shipwrecks and mutiny. Gulliver is a ship’s doctor, and on his fourth voyage only he is an expert in navigation, and, when he leaves, is in command of a ship. As in Robinson, it is a demon that gets the better of the pressure deriving from his family environment; like Robinson, at the end of each of his journeys, Gulliver takes home keepsakes and souvenirs from the unknown island – the dwarf-sheep from Lilliput that he turns into a flourishing business in England, or the enormous corn from Brobdingnag that he has cleaned, hollowed out, silver-plated, and modelled into the shape of a cup. 2. Almost all Robinson’s skills are transferred to Gulliver, but more important are the ones that are only his, or that he has acquired through his own efforts. He has read all the important authors, is a doctor by profession, your average sensual man, a shrewd observer, good at languages; sooner or later Gulliver will seek freedom after the situations of semi-imprisonment he experiences. Every time he manages to get back home safe and sound, he repeatedly and stubbornly goes to sea again, and again is taken prisoner, shuttling between departures and returns to the family routine. Since he is not in commerce, his voyages are not dictated by the mirage of profit, even though, in Part III, he embarks after being promised a doubling of his pay. To attribute profit as the reason for his journeys would have been, on Swift’s part, an ideological blunder, as would giving him the vocation of the colonizer. It is the Houyhnhnms that should be sent to Europe to civilize it, though, ironically, Gulliver ‘saves’ England from this possibility. Gulliver also shares with Robinson quick-wittedness and a practical mindset, as is seen when he makes himself a comb, or some chairs, or when he plays an enormous spinet, with keys almost a foot wide; he plays it as if it were a xylophone, using felt-covered hammers and running from one key 20 As pointed out by Jeffares 1976, 25, Part III, too, is based on an optical ploy: the science-fiction-like oddities seen through, in the sense of ‘laid bare’, by the lens of common sense.

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to another. His practical mentality is shown, too, when he makes a canoe and escapes in it from the land of the intelligent horses. It takes in fact four parts to realize completely the play on words contained in his name: Gulliver is ‘gullible’, and the novel does not present the best of all possible worlds, as in Defoe, but the exact opposite. Up to Part IV, Gulliver comes across as an apologist for and ingenuous exalter of the Establishment, and he secretly congratulates himself on having eluded some of the questions put to him, and thus bent reality in his favour. In Part IV, however, he is ‘de-Gulliverized’, disillusioned as regards the ethos he has always defended and praised. Gulliver is not at all the author’s mouthpiece: he is prey to the very prejudices and aberrations that Swift wishes to fight. Basically, his aim is not to educate, like Defoe, or reassure the reader, but redirect and re-educate; in short, disillusion.21 Defoe buttressed a false myth; Swift is more concerned with destroying than rebuilding, and Gulliver contains the ‘summa’ of his negative philosophy. Oddly enough, the only target Swift does not attack here is religion: he has already done that elsewhere. Religion is absent from all of the four countries visited by Gulliver; they do not even have a priesthood. 3. That Gulliver is a relentlessly argumentative book addressed to a reader is confirmed by the number of insistent metadiscursive appeals that serve to keep well open this line of communication. Indirect speech predominates over direct with the fiction of the ‘manipulated account’, which reports the substance of the conversation between characters but leaves out the details, as the extradiegetic narrator reminds us on more than one occasion. It is understood that all four parts of the story are to be thought of as remembered and written ex post. A good part of each is dedicated to an explanation, given by Gulliver at the request of the king or leader of the community whose guest he is, of how society works in England, after Gulliver has seen, or heard about their own system of government. A similar ‘conversation piece’, for such it might seem, is found in Part IV, where Gulliver’s explanation is followed by an answer from the ‘chief horse’. As I mentioned, the end result of the dialectical clashes

21

Letter to Pope quoted in Quintana 1966, 142. ‘Vex’ is the word used by Swift.

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between Gulliver and the various representatives of the islands is a realization on his part that he has so far believed in a whole series of false values, or, as the wise horses would say, ‘things that are not’. For this reason, one might go further than was stated above, and say that Swift’s objective is to demonstrate that many travel tales, previously praised for their realism, are, in fact, unrealistic, simply because they have wasted a good opportunity to open their readers’ eyes and tell the truth. From this point of view, Defoe was no realist, while, in Gulliver, Swift proposes to present true realism, which entails disautomatization. He achieves this paradoxically, through Swiftian estrangement, in other words, forcing the reader to become aware of the real by destroying what merely seems real. In Part I, the inhabitants of Lilliput must, by looking at them, define and understand the use of the personal effects Gulliver has about him; they rummage through his pockets and make an inventory; they also find a hat, which they describe as a mysterious object. In Brobdingnag, a cat is of a monstrous size, and two enormous mice are run through with a sword, leaving a trail of blood. The narration is gruesome but the reader cannot identify. Gulliver obviously causes an instinctive defensive reaction in Lilliput, and parries the arrows of the Blefuscudians by donning a pair of spectacles; in Brobdingnag he is forced to ingratiate himself with the giants, and in the other islands, he has to switch from attack to defence, and ward off the blows. The first impression we have of Lilliput and Brobdingnag is they are deformed, grotesque caricatures of human society; on further consideration, the reader perceives lessons and admonishments that cast doubt on the presumed superiority of the society represented by Gulliver. Every state organism sooner or later shows its faults. In the course of his adventures, Gulliver relativizes the absolutes he had when he arrived; when he leaves, he is, for some time, a victim of other automatisms that he must relativize, in a play of perspectives that abates in Part III, but returns in Part IV, with the last syllogistic deduction: the horses should subject humans to the same operation that men perform on horses, castration. 4. Robinson Crusoe forces Friday, albeit politely, to learn the English language; Gulliver never dreams of imposing the same Anglocentric obligation on at least four occasions. The preliminary step that opens each single part and each experience on the islands on which he wrecks, is to set up a

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channel of communication, first, by gestures, and then in the local tongue rather than in English, the language of the new arrival. The language skills of the eighteenth-century Englishman, Lemuel Gulliver, are equalled only by the indolence and awkwardness of later generations of Englishmen. In just a few months, he masters all four languages. The problems of linguistic communication are discussed, described, and theoretically contextualized in the four parts, though it is not possible to extract an organic system for each particular language.22 Swift has Gulliver refer a few sentences in each of the local tongues by way of demonstration, but without going into the morphology, syntax, grammar or place of the language with reference to other language groups. Swift’s objective, however, is not just to provide a comic juxtaposition of linguistic elements: the isolated phrases and the names of places and persons do have a meaning, though the various scholars who have attempted to translate them might not agree on what that meaning is. So, it might be said that Swift preannounces, and sometimes surpasses, albeit in a reduced form, the same ludic, polysemantic technique used by Joyce in Finnegans Wake. The four neo-languages, in the embryonic form in which they are presented and spoken, are a relativization of western languages; they suggest the degeneration of language as a means of accurate communication. So they are still more mystifying; or else they have kept or recovered the original purpose of language and languages, which is the perfect matching of words with things. Swift believes in the Foucaultian, deictic genesis of words as sounds conventionally used to correspond to objects pointed to using the hand. It is an arbitrary equivalence, accepted by contract in a given society, and is founded on onomatopoeia. Conscious that language must serve the needs of an advanced society, and that therefore it must be able to deal with the problem of abstract concepts, Swift opts for a quite arbitrary phonosymbolism, as we shall see. Above all, it is urgent to safeguard a language composed of words that are only names of things. 22

His 1711 Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue was, according to Johnson, ‘written without much knowledge of the general nature of language, and without any accurate enquiry into the history of other tongues’ ( JLI, vol. II, 192). The proposal of an academy to make laws to preserve the language forever is another proof of Swift’s conservatism.

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The conclusions are drawn in the country of the talking horses, where the word for ‘lie’ does not exist because lies do not exist. If necessary, one must fall back on a circumlocution, like ‘the thing that is not’. Swift was terrorized by the wide margins of ambiguity and mystification that exist in all languages, and by the corruption of the ideal purpose of communication – the unhindered sharing of information – and shifts the system of communication back in evolutionary time to an imagined archaic stage when nuanced neighing was used instead of words. On the contrary, the rest of the world uses a degenerated language, full of words for things that do not exist, and therefore suitable only for deceit and trickery. The ideal form of language, and writing, and more so, of a literature that deals with things as they are, in a plain and sober style, is reflected in the machine for producing literary and scientific texts that Gulliver sees in the Academy of Lagado. Here Swift seems to be undermining the very institution of literature, or at least to be satirizing the randomness behind the constructions composed of purely abstract words. The awareness of linguistic evolution is exemplified by the episode of the Struldbruggs, whose unhappiness and isolation is due, in part, to a language they can no longer keep up with, so that they need interpreters when they wish to speak with the younger generations. Swift finds himself having to face the possibility that language itself bears the signs and traces of corruption and degeneration, and is consistent with man’s Yahoo nature. The arbitrary phonosymbolism lies in the fact that these Yahoo signs and traces are linked to certain phonemes that are prevalent and recurrent in the lexis of the islands. The term ‘puta’ is found often in the two reigns of Lilliput and Brobdingnag, and of course, in the name of the island of Laputa. The same [u:] is found in ‘Yahoo’. Almost every phrase written down in the first three journeys echoes some vulgar word or other, especially Italian. On the other hand, it seems that the ideal language, uncorrupted, virgin and functional, abounds in the [i:] sound. § 93. Swift V: ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ II. The enigma of Part IV Taken by itself, extrapolated from the context of Swift’s works as a whole, Gulliver points the finger at the degeneration of history, which has dwindled to a standstill, and at the complete breakdown of the political and social structure and of the entire Establishment of the developed world. It

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concludes that man, pessimistically pronounced capax rationis in a letter to Pope, has regressed to the level of the beast: his ratio has atrophied, and the animal in him has free rein, showing no sign of allowing him to regain his human dimension and restore reason to its rightful place as guide and mentor. Yet, on reflection, after reading the book, one realizes that this desolate picture is attributed by Swift, mischievously, to his character, Gulliver: the account is, therefore, a dramatic objectivization, and should be taken as such. Whatever Swift’s ideological involvement, the glaring pessimism and desecrating phantasmagoria of Gulliver are contradicted by his many constructive interventions both before and after Gulliver. Not only is Part IV not the high point of Swift’s misanthropic, visionary pessimism: it was also written before the third, and for the next twenty years Swift kept turning out pamphlets, only one of which, the Modest Proposal, is anywhere near the paradoxical sarcasm of the Yahoos and the wise horses. 2. In Glubdubdrib, literally, the Island of the Warlocks or Wizards, Swift has Gulliver expose history, or rather, reveal a provocative counterhistory that is the one and only true history. He goes on a Dantesque journey to the otherworld, and before him appear the figures of great men from the past, or supposedly so. This is an expedient to prove that the universe is possessed by lies and polluted by falsehood. Against the ‘official’ version of history, based on appearances and deception, the sequence of real events unfolds. Alexander the Great dies in a drunken fit; Caesar douses the fire of his valour, and the real fathers of many august, saintly figures turn out to be minstrels or prelates. Gulliver is forced to admit that chronological progress is, in fact, regression, or a race towards corruption and death. The demolition of the western system takes place, in Swift, within a context of preservation: he never gets to the point of abandoning the monarchy, or imagining a better form of government; three times out of four, Gulliver finds himself before a king or an emperor, usually anything but enlightened, honest and democratic.23 Even allowing for an ironic distancing between 23

The medal for the most tyrannical, despotic and absolute king goes to the ruler of Luggnag, who, sadistically and barbarously forces his subjects to crawl towards him while licking the floor. Gulliver betrays his prejudice and servility when he repeatedly praises the king for his clemency.

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author and protagonist, the perfect society of the wise horses is monarchic and oligarchic, or rather, a democracy based on assemblies. The discussion covers the four parts, with a crescendo in Part IV. In Lilliput, English politics, and therefore, politics tout court, is reduced to childish pettiness – see the unforgettable examples of rope-dancing or stick-jumping, high heels and low heels, big-enders and little-enders (preferred ways of opening eggs). Swift is quite the prankster, although in the short term Lilliput seems to be an absurdly repressive society. One of the first examples of Byzantine legislation is the prohibition forbidding anyone who has already seen Gulliver, from going nearer than fifty yards to him, unless in possession of a special pass (which enriches the court secretaries). The Lilliputians put a sleeping draught in Gulliver’s wine, and love to speechify in the open air. Gulliver is lodged in a huge deconsecrated temple, the scene of an ‘unnatural murder’. In the second journey he sings the praises of the English political system to the king of Brobdingnag, and believes he has honoured his country by glossing over the occasional flaw, but, little by little, by dint of rhetorical questioning (‘Whether …’, or ‘How it came to pass …’), the king lays bare the system and shows its terrible shortcomings. So, for the second time, a new kingdom seems good at first but soon shows its defects. The king of Brobdingnag, because of the usual Swiftian relativism as well as the inevitable gap between theory and practice, is not very credible when he proposes a series of remedies, or when he castigates the English with a peremptory formula that has become proverbial: ‘the most pernicious race of little, odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl’ on the surface of this earth.24 Part III follows on from the second, and, in turn, anticipates the fourth in its renewed, powerful denunciation of eighteenth-century warmongering, expansionism and colonialism. Many absurd wars were being fought at the time, on the flimsiest of pretexts, with 24 The secondary target of satire in Part III is expressed by the allegory of the flying island (representing England), which, at the least sign of rebellion from the mainland (Ireland, stubborn and dangerous), comes down to land, and threatens destruction, though it runs the risk of receiving counter-attacks that would weaken its adamantine base. Clear allusions to ‘Wood’s halfpenny’ (§ 91.3) led to the relevant passages being cut by the censor.

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huge loss of lives and resources. The king of Laputa, that is, George I, is the most emblematic and representative figure of the absolute monarch, ready to use repressive measures, and opposed in vain by politicians and people. The rebellion of Lindaloin, representing Dublin and Ireland, is fuelled by Swift’s own writings, which paint a utopistic picture of a king, who, faced by danger, must give in before it is too late. The national economy allows and encourages the costly importation of food and drinks that are harmful to the health, so we find an attack on this economic system, as well as on contemporary medicine that resorts to wild and wonderful remedies to cure self-procured, and therefore avoidable, diseases. In the community of the wise horses, the errors of so-called civilized society are corrected, overturned, and thus confirmed, on the basis of a presumed return to a state of nature. The horses, who know nothing of vice, or power, or greed, idealize universal brotherhood, abhor all affectation and formalism, resolve all disputes pacifically, and organize sexual desire and the propagation of the species through the use of reason. Of the four countries visited, only the horse community is immune from degeneration, although the horses are inexplicably obliged to segregate the Yahoos in a regime that smacks of apartheid. 3. In concrete terms the main object of Swift’s satire in Part III of Gulliver is the Royal Society, a polemical leitmotif that runs through all four parts, at times in the background, at others in a quite manifest role. The king of Lilliput is a patron of science, and a promoter of mathematics and technological research. More abrasive is the diagnosis of the three learned men of Brobdingnag appointed by the king to inspect Gulliver, a satire on the fantastical Byzantinism of post-Aristotelian science, falsely and vainly rigorous and deductive, but in reality proceeding by blunders and errors. Part III, instead, is entirely centred on the mad utopias of science, which even demands involvement in the political sphere, with the direst of consequences. The prime characteristic of the Laputians is their indifference to the call of humanity: they are so immersed in the movement of the planets and the music of the spheres (symbolized by the squint in their eyes) as to be eternally distracted and absent-minded. Other targets are added to drive home the message of the damage done by science. In Lagado, Gulliver sees a landscape of squalid architecture and cropless fields that contrast with

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the supposed level of research achieved by contemporary science. The visit to the Academy of Lagado (a surreal version of the Royal Society) marks the beginning of the most grotesque and far-fetched episode of the whole part: in this madhouse, the scientific vision is deformed in dozens of deranged experiments. The final picture of the Struldbruggs serves, as I have said, to point Gulliver’s naïvety, when he is informed that theirs is not eternal youth, but never-ending old age: immortality is an atrocious punishment.25 4. In the first three journeys, the traces of Yahooism are camouflaged. In Part IV there is a saltus, and the prospected solution is the re-conversion of an anthropocentric universe into an upside down one in which man has been toppled from his pedestal. Swift cannot allow man to be a harmonious union of body and spirit; rather than made in God’s image, he is now more like an animal. Starting with Gulliver’s copious flow of urine in Lilliput as soon as his bonds are loosened, and the detailed description of him defecating in the sacred temple, and the Rabelaisian putting out of the fire, Swift has been eloquent – perhaps excessively so – on physiological urges and bodily functions. On the other hand, the talking horses are the quintessence of cleanliness of body and mind, while the Yahoos, who have climbed up into the branches of the trees, shower Gulliver with their droppings.26 In Brobdingnag, Gulliver has to be measured, justified and accepted by the giants, who might recognize the Yahoo in him, as they, too, are indeed Yahoos. Gulliver appears to them like some freak, or insect; he is taken for a weasel, and by others a spider or a toad. He manages to pass himself off as a rational creature, but the focalization is ambiguous, because the 25

An echo of this controversy is found in Part IV, in the description of the serene acceptance of death by the Houyhnhnms. 26 Only the nurse, Glumdalclitch, who some say is an idealization of Stella (§ 94), escapes the misogynous condemnation of women as grasping, sensual, lascivious, tending towards the sluttish. In the visit to the political section of the Academy of Lagado, one of the many paradoxical reforms referred to is the introduction of a tax on gallantry, wit, and female comeliness, as all who possess these gifts boast of them, instead of a levy on honour, justice and learning, which are held in no account. Similarly, women should be taxed for their beauty and elegance, in which they are convinced they excel.

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Brobdingnagians themselves have at first been mistaken for barbarians or monsters. Yet, as usually happens, in the end it’s six and two threes: already in the clutches of the dark devil of degeneration, after two pages Swift shoves right in front of our eyes, and as a pretext, to boot, the horrendous breast of the nurse of the farmer’s daughter:27 if the Brobdingnagians need a microscope, Gulliver has at his disposal a natural magnifying glass, two, in fact, that allow him to see that an object usually desired and sexually arousing like the female breast, is in fact quite disgusting, with its crinkled, pimply skin. Similarly, the smell of sweat exuded by the Brobdingnagians is the same that he produced in Lilliput. To continue the parallels, the monkey treats him like a hairy being and a Yahoo in pectore. In the fourth journey, Gulliver is brought face to face with his true nature and essence: he meets the Yahoos, who are nothing but men who have reverted to a prior ape-like state (this is 100 years before evolutionary theory began to be taken seriously). Gulliver, who, with what is left of his naïvety, declares himself to be a great admirer of the human race, can only accept the evidence. Few things separate him from them, mostly due to the difference in environment, and the clothes he wears, besides the question of food (he refuses the carrion and roots devoured by the Yahoos). The horses are given a confirmation of his nature when they see him naked and covered with hair, even if his skin is white, and he has the strange ‘affectation’ of walking upright, on his ‘hind legs’. His Yahoo nature is borne home on him by the lascivious attack he is subjected to: the monster attacks his descendant. When the horses are told about humans by Gulliver, they consider them to be significantly worse than the Yahoos – more grasping, greedier, more power-hungry. This is the reason the horse council urges the head of the community to sentence Gulliver to expulsion from their territory. Besides everything, to the greater honour of the Yahoos and dishonour of men, it transpires that the former are untouched by the vice of sodomy. The proposal put forward by the assembly of horses to subject the Yahoos to castration, refers back to a reflection in the journey to Lilliput: the denunciation of the hypocrisy that lies hidden in the institution of marriage, of concupiscence that is at 27

The breasts of Yahoo women that sag disgustingly to their feet are superimposed on and visually linked to the nurse’s embonpoint.

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the basis of procreation, and of the ‘miseries of human life’ (so great that children should not thank their parents for bringing them into the world). 5. Part IV of Gulliver became an object of discussion as soon as the novel was published, and has continued to give rise to different interpretations and responses, some of them diametrically different, ranging from the thesis of a ferocious attack against man in general, to others that are, we might say, ‘salvationist’ in extremis, which would correspond to one of the great triumphs of irony, or at least, of insinuation. If, on the one hand, in this part the civil institutions are de facto definitively eliminated, Swift realized that it was not easy to find a viable utopian alternative: quite deliberately, the Houyhnhnms are not made to represent this option, despite the apparent letter of the text, which invalidates with numerous signs the thesis it is meant to demonstrate. Orwell remarked that the Houyhnhnm regime foreshadows totalitarianism, bent on preserving a rigid status quo, striking with all the power of the ‘law’ those who oppose it, and cutting off the life-blood and dynamism necessary for a meaningful life in a civilized society.28 The ambiguity of Part IV has been completely overturned since it was hypothesized, and proved, so it was thought, that the horses are not to be admired, but emerge from the story in a sorry state and much diminished. Not only: the whole Part IV is, according to this argument, a defence of ‘Yahooism’. Deconstruction began when Leavis claimed that the Yahoos have life, while the horses have reason – or, more precisely, the aseptic coldness of reason. With regard to the talking horses, Tuveson29 cites the possibility – which, apparently, is not mentioned or discussed by anyone else – that Swift may have got the idea from the English translation (1702), by one Tom Brown, of Circe by Giovan Battista Gelli, and, in particular, from a passage in which ‘a man that was a horse’ refuses to return to his human state when offered the chance by Ulysses; but Ulysses adds that horses do not possess ‘right reason’. Swift is certainly the first link 28

Quintana (1966, 28–31) has a point when he trumps Orwell’s essay with one by Yeats (in Explorations, New York 1973, 343–69), which argues that Swift must be seen in the context of a particular historical period, and, in fact, expresses the ideology of the post-1688 Establishment. 29 Tuveson 1964, 10.

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in the complex phenomenon of evolutionism that was to lead to the idea that not only was man descended from the chimpanzee, but the inverse process was possible, as imagined by H. G. Wells in his masterly The Island of Dr Moreau.30 § 94. Swift VI: ‘Journal to Stella’ In his letters to her, Swift uses the name of ‘Varina’ to address Miss Waring, a young lady with whom he fell in love as soon as he arrived in Ireland to take up his position as curate. In 1699, when he was still employed as secretary to Sir William Temple, he had met ‘Stella’, real name Esther Johnson, perhaps a daughter of Temple himself. She was, at the time, eight years old, while Swift was thirty-two. He became her tutor. When he was appointed dean of St Patrick’s in Dublin, Swift talked her into moving to Dublin, to be near him, accompanied by one Rebecca Dingley, a distant relation. Their relationship had become ambiguous and morbid, but any possible intimacy was deliberately regulated, not to say repressed, and appearances saved, by the ever-present chaperone. Those who doubt Swift’s marriage to Stella, pointing out that there is no evidence of any secret wedding, base their case on the fact that both realized that they were related by blood, albeit distantly. That from 1710 to 1714 Swift spent most of his time in London instead of Dublin, is the fortunate, unforeseen event that gave rise to the series of letters that has become known as Journal to Stella. Published only in 1766–1768, the correspondence consists of sixtyfive letters of a documentary nature, full of witticisms, tenderness, and 30

In his two long critiques significantly entitled ‘Ragione e corpo nei Viaggi di Gulliver’ [‘Reason and body in Gulliver’s Travels’] (SDR, 115–36 and 137–72), Sertoli identifies and follows, right from Part I, a Gulliver who is obsessed, to the point of insanity, with the expulsion (‘ablation’) of gross physicality and the hubris of pure rationality. Sertoli’s reading of Part IV turns on: a) the concept of ‘extroflexion’ – the removal, by the horses, of the corporal quid of the Yahoos; b) the self-portrayal by the horses as examples of pure, aseptic rationality, and therefore virtue; c) the horses’ awareness that Gulliver’s presence causes stirrings of the Yahoo in them; they respond by expelling this disturbing Freudian element. For Sertoli, Gulliver’s ‘normalization’ is an anticipation of a Freudian case of the violence of the super-ego on the narcissistic ego.

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pleasantries. Its peculiar linguistic code has delighted readers through the centuries with its whimsicalities and capriciousness, such as the preponderance in the text of very short sentences, made up of the classic subject, verb and complement, the deformation of words and use of code, child’s talk, epic and mock-heroic allusions and the continual reference to himself and the addressee in the third person, as Presto and Stella (‘Presto’ being an obvious Italian translation of his name, Swift). Similar ludic language looks forward to Sterne, and rings warning bells of the arrival, 200 years in the future, of Joyce’s comic stream of consciousness, and in particular of certain parts of Finnegans Wake. Esther Vanhomrigh, or Vanessa (whose family had come to England from Holland), met Swift in London in 1707, and her house became the headquarters of the Tories until 1713. Dean Swift wrote letters and poems anagramming himself as Cadenus. The two rival Esthers were to meet when one of Vanessa’s letters was delivered to Stella. Passionate Vanessa died in 1723, and was ‘set in stone’ by Swift, more or less like Varina; Stella in 1728. § 95. Swift VII: Swift the poet For Swift, poetry was a lifelong, unobtrusive accompaniment to his more public activity as a writer of polemical satire, and has in common with the prose tracts the same objects of scorn, if not loathing: the poetasters of Grub Street, to whom he applies the metaphor of the Mechanical Operation, the denunciation of Walpole’s monetized, commercialized regime, the exposure of things that ‘the muse’ is usually silent on: rubbish, filth, refuse. By its statute, it is poetry that does not ‘soar’: it has no wind or vapour, in the meaning of the terms used in the 1704 pamphlet. The poems of misogynistic aversion are distant echoes of the unlovely portrayal of the Yahoo females. First there was the announcement, then the fading, and now the last twitches of his twisted relation with the feminine. Seen in this light, the Strephon of ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’ represents Gulliver. Swift began his poetic activity with a few Pindaric odes, which drew from Dryden words that were far from flattering. Swift retorted with The Battle of the Books, followed by systematic signs of hostility. After that, he settled for the couplet, in eight or ten syllables – limping, pedestrian and unsubtle at times – which had the advantage of simplifying and clarifying the

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meaning and targets of his satire, without all the ballast of false prefaces, and parodic extravaganzas. Any discussion of Swift’s poetry should start with ‘On Poetry: A Rhapsody’, a satire on the whole contemporary literary scene. The only true poet was Pope: around him, as we know, span a world of warring would-bes, who believed themselves geniuses and darlings of the muses. Swift lampoons and extinguishes their sacred fire, essentially comparing them to Yahoos, far inferior to beasts who know their place and do not aspire to what nature has placed beyond them. This multitude of mediocre writers constituted a class in search of social collocation, but unfit to contribute towards reforming the state and in any other public office whatever. The rhapsody continues in the form of a seasoned selfstyled writer’s advice to a beginner: what the recipe for poetry is, and how it should be gone about. There existed, so it seems, a manual containing formulas and tips for finding favour – again, a ‘mechanical’ operation. Swift provides an admirable summary of the contemporary literary production chain, in which the key stages are the offer of the material to the publisher, the discussion of the book, and its fruition. It was understood that books should appear anonymously, to impede preventative hostile criticism. So, an author, sitting in a coffee-house where his book is being discussed, will think twice before revealing his identity so as not to provoke a hail of critical comment; he might even be blamed for works that are not his. The semi-ingenuous, objective poet tries time and time again to climb the ladder to success. Then he is advised to seek favour in the court and with the reigning monarch of the day, prime minister Walpole. The interior poetic voice teaches the budding poet how to flatter, and thus turn into a Popian ‘dunce’. The alternative is to become a ‘critical poet’ once the tools of the trade have been acquired, that is to say, a good stock of impressive quotations taken from that most authoritative of sources, Dryden. A pendant to this rhapsody is ‘Verses on the Death of Dr Swift’, in which the poet imagines how his friends and the literary milieu will react to the news of his passing. The poet himself enters the fray, acknowledging the poisonous rivalry that pollutes the very air he has been breathing. True to predictions, his death unleashes a barrage of now innocuous comments from friends, enemies, acquaintances, and famous people, all caught in singularly telling portraits. In a year’s time, no one well remember him.

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The last 100 lines give a proud summary of Swift’s achievements and his qualities of honesty and objectivity. 2. Almost every literary genre, fashion and institution is parodied by Swift. In his version of Ovid’s ‘Baucis and Philemon’, the cottage is transformed into a church as a reward for the services rendered by the old couple to two holy hermits, who, by means of Swiftian ‘cant’, knock, are invited to come in and restored. Then we have the Swiftian ascent of the ‘spirit’, but with some object, like a kettle, that refuses to rise. Philemon and Baucis are changed into yews, and then felled, like any other trees. In the verses for Stella’s birthday, there is an obvious desublimation and dePetrarchization of love by means of the banishing of the paraphernalia of erotic verse. The sketches of the city waking up, and the shower, are, at first sight, almost like some of Leopardi’s idylls in the minute observation of life. Then come the inevitable cynical, barbed comments against various corrupt and immoral practices. Caught in the sudden shower, the London ladies rush to save their skin consigning to the devil etiquette and appearance. The cunningly delayed climax of ‘Cassinus and Peter’, organized in the form of a markedly dramatic dialogue between students, arrives when Cassinus reveals that his romantic, sublimated concept of love has been sullied at the sight of Celia defecating – an extreme oxymoron indeed. ‘Phillis’, one of Swift’s many powerfully ironic female names, flows quickly and wittily with a number of arch metapoetic parentheses in the manner of Byron. The feigned prude’s dream of eloping with the butler is destroyed by the reality of a disappointing relationship. § 96. Addison* ‘Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison’. This solemn declaration, this heartfelt recommendation 1

*

Complete collection of the Spectator edited by D. F. Bond, 5 vols, Oxford 1965. J. Lannering, Studies in the Prose Style of Joseph Addison, Uppsala 1951; R. M. Colombo, Lo ‘Spectator’ e i giornali veneziani del Settecento, Bari 1966; P. Smithers, The Life of Joseph Addison, Oxford 1968; D. Kay, Short Fiction in the ‘Spectator’, Tuscaloosa, AL 1975; E. A. and L. D. Bloom, Joseph Addison’s Sociable Animal: In the Market Place, on the Hustings, in the Pulpit, Providence, RI 1971, and, as editor,

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ends Johnson’s ‘Life of Joseph Addison’ and alludes to the more than 500 numbers of the newspaper Spectator, co-edited with Steele, half of which written by Addison (1672–1719) from 1711 to 1712, with an appendix in 1714. Of course, Johnson never praises any writer unreservedly, and in the case of Addison, some criticism is levelled at the poetry and his tragedy, Cato, which he nonetheless defines as ‘unquestionably the noblest production of Addison’s genius’. Right from the early years of the century, Addison was hailed as a master of taste and a corrector of manners by means of the pleasant, non-invasive therapy of the satirical-humorous sketch in a studied variety of registers. Master of manners, but, above all, master of style: the Romantics, and, especially, the Victorians inherited this admiration and respect for Addison’s literary accomplishments. In 1843, Macaulay honoured him with a long essay, enthusiastic without being ecstatic, but fixing, as in marble, his achievements. Thackeray leans heavily on Macaulay for his gentlemanly encomium of Addison included in his lectures on the English humorists. Outside of England, Johnson’s advice was beginning to be ignored, and in England, too, by readers and critics in the middle and late nineteenth century, who were more cosmopolitan and sophisticated than their predecessors. After holding back for a few pages, Taine mockingly brands Addison as intellectually ‘mediocre’ and his moralizing so awkward and obvious as to make any Frenchman want to put the book down and go out for a breath of fresh air: Addison delivers his precepts so mechanically, so precisely, in little packages of precise calculations and mathematical formulae. Taine found Addison’s much acclaimed style too regular and ‘classical’, neutral and even monotonous. To be sure, the French critic was writing under the influence of a post-Romantic prejudice, according to which style should be mimetic, and recreate passion and ‘the force of natural inspiration’. Taine and Arnold were forgetting Johnson’s summingup: ‘Addison is now despised by some who perhaps would never have seen his defects, but by the lights which he afforded them’. By 1919 Virginia Woolf 1 was distancing herself from any residual appreciation of Addison, CRHE (with Steele), London 1982, 2013; R. M. Otten, Joseph Addison, Boston, MA 1982. 1

‘Addison’, in TCR, First Series, 105–15.

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classifying him as a writer for the nostalgic provincial elite: obsolete, stale in taste and thought, and besides everything, a bit of a prude. With this, Addison ceased to be the average Englishman’s morning tonic: no more Spectator and tea for breakfast.2 It is not, however, that Addison is a frequent target for critics: he is no massive, gigantic figure; he uses the rapier rather than the club, and, if he has not many friends, his enemies are few and far between. The prevalent critical position today seems to be neutrality: it would appear paradoxical to fustigate a popularizer, even less a ‘communicator’, at a time when popularization in all fields has become a weapon for rescuing the re-illiterate and reducing ignorance and poor taste. 2. Addison was born neither a journalist nor an essayist, but a classicist and diplomat. The son of a clergyman and educated at Oxford, where he soon stood out for the excellence of his translations from Latin, he was ‘taken up’ by Dryden, who recommended him to various influential politicians. They were quick to see he had the qualities to become a future state functionary. As an apprenticeship, he was sent on a four-year round trip to Europe, for which he was paid the generous sum of 300 pounds sterling per year. On his return in 1703 he published a Letter from Italy, a series of reflections, in verse, containing the standard criticism of Catholicism and of the despotism of the Italian principalities, together with an obvious love for the classical world. The curious Dialogues upon the Usefulness of Precious Medals appeared posthumously. The Campaign (1705) was commissioned to celebrate the victory of Blenheim, and sing the praises of England as the bastion of liberty and the guardian of the peace in Europe, which she is ready to defend with the force of arms. Marlborough is already presented as a clear-thinking, restrained spectator surrounded by the fury of the elements, like the angel commanded by God to sow tempest, and then to calm the storm; this image became extremely popular with the English. Addison’s first steps reveal his ambition, not only in the diplomatic field, but on the literary scene as well: he was determined to become a leading figure in the genre of patriotic literature that was on the side of the Whigs, with distant traces of Puritan polemics. His long Italian journey had followed the 2

The lowest point was touched in the 1960s. Cf. B. Dobrée in DEE, 120: ‘Today his influence is non-existent’.

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footsteps of Milton, and Addison, like Dryden, was on the road that might lead, through the classics and the theatre, to the Laureateship. His tragedy, Cato, was completed and performed in 1713, but the first four acts were probably written shortly after his return from Italy. At that point Addison lowered his sights and fell back on the honest, and well-paid, position as public servant. He was a member of Parliament from 1708 until his death, secretary to the Viceroy of Ireland in 1709, and again in 1714, and in 1718 he was made secretary of state. When no longer a young man, he married a shrewish countess, the mother of a boy he had been tutoring, and, having put together a tidy sum, bought himself a luxurious mansion. 3. Addison was, without doubt, virtually the minister for culture of the Whig party, but Cato presented such a balanced, equidistant position that it was claimed by three rival groups: the Whigs were convinced that Cato was meant to represent Marlborough; the Tories thought it was Caesar who stood for the English general; the American colonists believed they heard a friendly voice in the plot of the Numidian Juba and of Marcia. The inevitable fight with Pope broke out when Addison praised Ambrose Philips’s pastorals above those by Pope. In addition, Addison had encouraged and then applauded Tickell’s Homer.3 In the last year of his life, he broke off relations with Steele, too. Despite all this, Addison really was a mild, politically independent man. While travelling in Italy and Europe, he had become, unwittingly, a ‘spectator’, and the Letter from Italy I have referred to contains anticipations of articles and sketches that were to appear in the paper. He placed the stamp of his personality firmly on the Spectator, and also on the earlier Tatler, though the latter is largely the work of Steele. Modelled on the Tatler, the Spectator appeared in a first series from March 1711 to December 1712; the paper came out daily, except on Sundays, and was sold at one penny, later twopence. Publication was suspended, then briefly resumed in 1714. The entire collection in eight volumes appeared in 1712–1715, the first of many. It has been estimated that 10,000 copies were sold, or, at least, read per day. After the Spectator, Addison edited, less successfully, The Guardian and The Freeholder. The Spectator too was 3

§ 76.2 for Pope’s epistle to Arbuthnot, in which Addison is scornfully referred to as ‘Atticus’.

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a joint production; of the numbers published, half were by Addison and half by Steele. The new stratagem they invented entailed sending articles, not from various clubs here and there in London according to the subject matter, but from a single place, an imaginary debating club where ideas were exchanged and discussed under the guidance of Mr Spectator,4 Addison’s persona representing a learned and expert traveller who is interested in everything life has to offer. The regulars of the club include the inevitable ‘types’ representing each of the social classes; particularly auspicious for the future is the peaceful but lively co-existence between the two ruling groups of the country, the old country gentry and the wealthy merchant class. Both Defoe and Swift proposed to educate, the latter, in particular, by means of cutting irony and disautomatizing paradox. Addison, on the other hand, shrinks from verbal violence and educates with an attractive mixture of mildness and politeness. His satire neither stings nor wounds; instead of shouting, it uses understatement. The declared purpose is to transmit and instil an organic base of knowledge considered to be in keeping with the historical period. As he was not an original thinker, he relied greatly on Locke for his reflections on epistemology, logic, politics, ethics, and aesthetics. The requirements of popularization often obscure the fact that, in many fields, Addison was amateurish: his articles on theology, for example, are verbose, inconclusive summaries of commonplaces that sound like a very rough copy of Traherne or Vaughan. He died without realizing that he had contributed, along with countless others, to the rise of the novel that celebrated the life and manners of the urban middle class. His sketches of town and country life contain the seeds of the novels of Fielding, Sterne and Richardson. It is quite a coincidence that the Victorian novel, in turn, will be ushered in by Dickens in the form of ‘Posthumous Papers’ of another club consisting of four delightful eccentrics. 4. An integral reading of the Spectator, necessarily posthumous, brings out a number of small, uniform thematic threads, like different registers on a keyboard, with the same optical illusion that dogs the reader of the serial 4

Since 1704, Addison had been part of the Kit-Kat Club. Its members included Congreve and Vanbrugh.

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novel, because the newspaper appeared every day and dealt with apparently different subjects according to the news of the day. In reality, units or threads of contents were formed in real time, and consecutive articles added or inserted. Later, it was possible to collect the numbers of the single series in files in short, unauthorized monographs. This applies particularly to the articles dedicated to Sir Roger de Coverley, gathered together and presented as a kind of novel never intended by Addison, though he returned to this character periodically. Sir Roger is a country squire – eccentric, good-hearted, witty – whose life still revolves, at a distance of many years, around a sentimental mishap he cannot forget, being turned down when he proposed to a haughty widow in his youth. The de Coverley saga rolls on sleepily, untroubled by any particularly dramatic events, warmed by a sense of humour (always contained, never shouted) until it is brought to an end by the death of the knightly gentleman. Addison ventures imprudently into the theoretical when he dedicates several successive numbers to an explanation of Milton’s poetry, or when he discourses approvingly on the heritage of the Border Ballads, and enumerates and examines the pleasures of the imagination and the way taste is formed. A section on poetic style takes a stand against false wit, and celebrates the demise of Shakespearean punning. This has led some to speak of the advent of dissociation of sensibility, since Addison is in favour of a rational accord between two similar entities rather than the clash of two dissimilar ones. The author of realistic sketches is always to some degree a practitioner of fantastic realism. For example, Addison repeatedly photographs the various crazes that have made the English famous worldwide: clubs (still being) formed to allow the cultivation of the strangest hobbies, or the weirdest human categories, but with no hint of disapproval, indeed with a smile of approbation at yet another example of civil and peaceful co-existence. Eccentricity in behaviour or actions, extravagance and unconventionality are accepted as manifestations of the typically English ‘hobbyhorse’, innocuous whims, not vices but minor, picturesque irregularities. See, for instance, the space given to the fictitious gentleman who aspires to the position of ‘Comptroller General of the London cries’, in an essay that lists with humour and sympathy all the vocal and instrumental sounds of the city. Social life is, for Addison, full of anomalies, which must be tolerated; and yet, something like a mild

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criticism of these little ‘follies’ sticks, otherwise it might be said that the barbs against the ladies’ capriciousness or the Italian opera might be taken for the timid announcement of a philistine taste. The vanity of human life is often at the heart of allegories such as the famous vision of Mirza, which makes no great impression, like almost all of Addison’s naïve oriental tales, used to edify and educate his audience of readers. The individual essays do not always hit the mark, both because they are in general too limp and anonymous, and because the solutions are forced and far-fetched, like the anatomies of the heart of the owl or the brain of the fop, or the letter from the instructor to his lady-pupils on the use of the fan. The article on the mesmerizing spectacle of the Royal Exchange is emblematic of Addison’s strengths and weaknesses as an ideologue and stylist: it proceeds in solemn, lapidary sentences to extol London as the commercial heart of the globe, where all races meet to trade, and all the languages of the world are heard. Addison struts with almost pompous satisfaction at the thought that he, like the old philosopher, is a citizen of the world. The underlying idea is the very modern pride in a network linking all of the farthest points of the planet, and an economy that has become a kind of multinational production chain that transforms raw material into the finished product, an amalgam of all the elements supplied by this eighteenth-century ‘world wide web’. § 97. Steele I: Apostle to the gentiles Before becoming the founding father of English journalism (his only rival was his predecessor, Defoe, his only collaborator, Addison), Richard Steele (1672–1729) moved his first, uncertain steps in the field of his own peculiar form of religious preaching. His experience in that line was meteoric, while he lasted longer in the theatre. Both these activities were, however, essential stages in the preparation for his future career. The Christian Hero, a spiritual tract, is an update of Puritan meditation; in the theatre, the four plays he completed, three before and one after the beginning of his journalistic activity, present a sustained, concentrated effort to adapt the drama to the moralizing precepts contained in Collier’s 1698 pamphlet, A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, and accepted by playwrights ever since the beginning of the new century. So, Steele should not be seen as exclusively belonging to the sphere of

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journalism: he is, far more than Addison, an all-round, independent writer, with a well-defined biographical and literary outline. Often overshadowed by Addison, he is stylistically less guarded and flawless, more prone to slipping into undisciplined sentiment and momentary whimsicality. Their twoman team was the ideal outcome of Steele’s intuitiveness and abundance of ideas, and Addison’s clinical skill in developing and growing these ideas. Steele’s romantic fascination is that of a maudit in the grip of dizzying oscillations. He was daring, sanguine, a megalomaniac, a kind of lay saint or a missionary out to evangelize the bourgeoisie, preaching a profound and radical conversion, even metanoetic, in an age when, as Swift suspected, belief had become nominal and formal, rational and skin-deep – a mere label. His loud profession of piety, however, was contradicted by a life that was far from exemplary, full of weaknesses, sudden falls, disorientation and loss of will-power. The earnestness and fervour of his belief are like a Protestant version of Crashaw and the Baroque. Of Irish Protestant ascendancy, the son of a magistrate, he seemed to have buried his Irishness when he was taken to England at the age of five, after the deaths of both his parents. He was a fellow student of Addison’s at Charterhouse and Oxford, and had got on well with him, though the two were very different in temperament. Steele, in fact, refused to follow the classical curriculum, left Oxford before graduating, never became a good Latinist; he was, in short, not cut out for the reclusive life of the professional scholar. Instead, suddenly, at the age of twenty-two, he joined a cavalry regiment, and was a soldier for all of twenty years, during which he was also a part-time journalist. In 1701, a Pauline experience of illumination led to the writing and publication of the manual of the Christian hero, intended for the benefit of his fellow soldiers, and all the more credible because in it he fustigated sins that were familiar to them all, and that he himself had committed. Indefatigable like only Defoe in starting up new journals, he was elected to Parliament in 1713, and served for several legislatures. He was knighted by the Hanovers when they came to power, as a reward for support he had always given them. He was also made manager of the Drury Lane theatre. After ten tumultuous years, packed with activities and positions that never paid enough to keep him in the manner to which he aspired, he retired to Wales, tired and disillusioned, still laden with debts. He was always a

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spendthrift, and his life was a day by day struggle to make money out of writing. The caring, respectful letters to his second wife, Prue, became a legend, and in his English Humourists, Thackeray pointed to them as examples of dedication to love and family. 2. In the second of the four chapters that make up The Christian Hero (1701) Steele is an Augustinian Platonist that separates soul from body and considers the former to be, in certain functions, independent and selfcontained, in open and blatant opposition to, for example, Swift. Steele goes on to reveal and argue the basis of his ontology, which is that man is distinguished from other beings by his conscience, or rather, consciousness, or conscientiousness, synonymous with humility and an antidote against ostentation and the desire for glory. The beginning, however, is quite different: a brief summary of the lives of Caesar, Cato and Brutus, demonstrates that paganism did not offer adequate answers to the important questions of life. The style swings from paraphrase to entreaty and from the theological treatise to the prophecy. The language draws nearer – anachronistically – to that of Donne’s more accessible sermons. In the third chapter, human history is said to have been transformed by the Incarnation, and, even more, by the preaching of St Paul, whom Steele thought of as a kind of alter ego: he summarizes the conversion on the road to Damascus, his journeys, the various phases of the Acts, and draws a parallel between the corruption of Corinth and the lasciviousness of London. The first group of three plays,1 written when he was still a soldier, were a detailed and carefully presented reply to the recent admonishments of Collier, who invited playwrights to a greater respect for decency and morals than was to be seen in Restoration drama. Reading the plays, however, one is led to discount the charge, except perhaps in one case, of an excessive didactic emphasis on the punishment of sin and the reward given to virtue, though it is true that Steele never presents morally objectionable scenes and his characters never use vulgar or scurrilous language. So, in my opinion, it is difficult to see in Steele the beginnings of the tearful, sentimental drama that was soon to become fashionable. On a purely technical and aesthetic level, none of 1

The Plays of Richard Steele, ed. S. S. Kenny, Oxford 1971.

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his four plays is a masterpiece: the dramatic action peters out, the main characters are slight and unfocused, the plots leave much to be desired. When it comes to recounting prior events, he is a disaster; his interlocutory dialogues are awkward. The odd scene, however, sticks in the memory, like the one of the battle of repartees between two servants. Steele burnt a play he had written at school (or university), and The Funeral (1701) is therefore considered his first dramatic work. A lord pretends to be dead – an old stratagem – in order to expose the dishonesty of his second wife (the crafty ‘widow’ is another recurrent figure), and thus witnesses the uprightness of the son that the second wife had persuaded him to disinherit. The honest son is accompanied by a servant who, in a frankly moving scene, recalls the generous masters of his youth from whom he learned the love of virtue and abhorrence of vice. In reality, the stage is occupied by boring, complicated subplots, or by farcical interludes, like the rambling speeches of the undertaker or the lawyer, aimed at satirizing the tricks and traps of the respective professions. Though The Funeral, like all of Steele’s plays, is in prose, every act, and the occasional scene, end with a heroic couplet that contains, in a nutshell, the moral of the story. The Lying Lover (1703), from Corneille, left the first night audience unimpressed: in other words, it was a flop. Yet, it is, compared to The Funeral, more compact and interesting, and has a good number of very lively scenes thanks to the strongly drawn principal character. It might seem to be, but is not, just another side-product of Restoration and post-Restoration theatre, hinging on the Oxford fop, Bookwit, who, fresh from his studies, arrives in London in search of female hearts to break, helped by his flowing talk, and full of the boasting of a miles gloriosus, whose distant forefathers had maybe kissed the Blarney stone. Courtship is immediately complicated by an unforeseen snag: the woman Bookwit thinks he has been courting is Victoria, not Penelope, whose hand the father has asked for his son. The liar is unmasked in public by the two ladies, despite a desperate attempt by Bookwit to defend himself. The fop gets drunk and meets his rival Lovemore in the street. A duel follows, during which Bookwit kills Lovemore and is arrested by a policeman whose speech is full of howlers with a Shakespearean ring. The scene shifts to inside Newgate prison, where we find Bookwit in conversation with thieves, astrologists, and other criminals. We sense a happy ending is

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in the offing when it is discovered that Lovemore is not dead but has only fainted. So Bookwit is not a murderer, and is released. All the characters gather at Penelope’s house to celebrate. Steele’s intention was to emphasize the futility of duels, and the dire legal consequences if engaged in. Given that he, like Farquhar, had almost killed a fellow-soldier in a duel, his obsession with this phenomenon is not surprising. The mendacious fop is saved also thanks to his father’s caring surveillance, and, for good measure, his fellow student who heroically offers to die in his stead. It is mainly owing to this display of affection that Bookwit’s rival removes his disguise and pardons him. 3. The storyline of The Tender Husband (1705) is similar to that of The Funeral, in which a husband pretends to be dead in order to unmask a greedy, lascivious wife. Here, a Mrs Clerimont falls into the trap set for her by her husband when he sends to her room a lover, who is a woman in disguise. The seduction scene is slow-moving and inconclusive, spied on by the husband who comes out from his hiding place and catches them in the act of this merely intended adultery. The wife comes to her senses, and the marriage is saved, unlike in Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness. The more humorous, indeed comic, element is the part of the plot concerning Clerimont’s younger brother, who attempts, with the help of an unscrupulous lawyer, to lay his hands on the person and property of a rich heiress, Biddy, addicted to French romances of chivalry. The heiress is betrothed to Humphrey, an apparently half-witted country bumpkin, who soon shows a considerable amount of common sense: he is a supposed idiot who is tired of being pushed around by his father. In Act II, a dialogue between Biddy and Captain Clerimont becomes an amusing mosaic parodying the language, style and conventions of the romance tradition (including Sidney). In Act III, Humphrey even gains the applause of the audience when, in a real clash of linguistic registers, he counters Biddy’s affected use of the ‘ancient’ phraseology of the world of chivalry. In a rather hurried finale, the bumpkin marries the woman in disguise, and Clerimont leads Biddy to the altar.

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4. The Conscious Lovers, as can be seen from the date (1722), comes after Steele’s great journalism, and fifteen years after his other plays.2 It was often performed despite being criticized by Dennis because the moral message did not flow naturally from the events, but was, instead, spelled out and underlined. This time, Dennis was right. This is Steele’s most didactic, moralizing play, and is practically a translation and transposition of Terence’s Andria. Fielding was to use Parson Adams as a mouthpiece to fustigate entire passages that, far from being comic, are nothing but sermons. Bevil’s father has chosen Lucinda as a wife for him, but just before the wedding the bridegroom-to-be realizes he is in love with Indiana, later discovered to be the half-sister of Lucinda (a far-fetched and unlikely complication). The ‘conscious’ of the title refers both to Bevil, torn between filial obedience and his love for Indiana, and to Lucinda, who, when Bevil confesses that he does not love her, accepts it, and releases him from his betrothal. Lucinda too feels she is being bullied by her mother, who wants her to marry some rich fop, while she, once she has given up Bevil, has set her sights on his friend, Myrtle. The self-control and reasonableness of the main characters are exemplified by lines like the following: ‘his actions are dictated by thought; and he has enough common sense to make even virtue fashionable’. It is not surprising that the dialogues between the two ex-betrothed are stiff and awkward. Equally topical is that one of the most frequent subjects of conversation is Italian opera, and which heroine is most deserving of admiration. The contest is won by Griselda, which happens to be the title of an opera by Bononcini that really was performed in London in 1722. In contrast, the dialogues between the two servants are masterpieces of wit; the two have fallen in love while cleaning the two sides of a window, inside and out. This curious episode is also featured in one of the numbers of the Tatler. In the controversy between children (treated ‘like horses at an auction’) and the impositions of parents, the former emerge victorious. Previously, the scene of the ‘wedding bill’ turned into a parody of the Italian opera buffa, with the lawyer and the notary in disguise. The denouement of the lost daughter is made possible by the recognition of a bracelet. 2

Bevil enters reading Addison’s vision of Mirza (§ 96.4).

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§ 98. Steele II: The newspaper man The Tatler3 and the Spectator were, as I mentioned, the tip of an iceberg: in the early years of the eighteenth-century newspapers and periodicals appeared at an astonishing rate, one after the other, to feed the hunger for news of a reading public in continuous expansion. They also provided work for a whole class of writers. The two papers named above raised the level of this budding journalism from mere gossip to the essay, the substantial leading article, reports, reviews, articles on manners, in-depth investigations of various phenomena. The simple conveying of news took second place to the kind of article that could later be re-published in collections, and savoured coolly and calmly at a later date. In other words, they form part of the tradition of the essay in English, and have nothing to do with the transience of ‘news-mongering’. Understandably, the reputation of the two papers spread quickly throughout Europe, giving rise to various imitations, especially in Italy (Gozzi, Baretti and Verri). Steele had already tried his hand at the spiritual handbook and the theatre; now, with the Tatler (the name reflects the human need to communicate, even on trivial subjects: one of the features of the newspaper was a section of letters from imaginary readers and answers supplied by the editor), he possessed a more direct and efficient instrument for reaching and influencing his readers. After a period as editor of the London Gazette, Steele founded the Tatler on April 12, 1709. The new paper came out three times a week, on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday (when the postal service distributed it outside London); the first four numbers were free, after which they cost a penny. It ceased publication all of a sudden, for no apparent reason, on January 2, 1711. Two months later Addison and Steele started the Spectator.4 Unlike today’s system, at that time newspapers were not the result of a production chain made up of various specialized operatives, but were founded, run and written by one, or at the most, two or three people; this was made possible by the fact that the paper consisted of one single page. Addison, who was then in Ireland, 3 4

Modern collection ed. G. A. Aitken, 4 vols, London 1899. Of the seven newspapers founded by Steele, only The Guardian achieved anything like the fame of the Tatler. None of them lasted long, soon swallowed up by political squabbling and propaganda.

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recognized the hand of his old Charterhouse friend in some details of the first numbers. He was hired, and wrote forty-two numbers out of a total of 271; thirty-six were written with Steele. 2. The first issue of the Tatler announced the launch of two simulations, which not everyone was able to decode, and was therefore taken in by: Steele signed his articles with the name of Isaac Bickerstaff, piggybacking, one might say, on the notoriety of Swift’s previous publication5 (Swift was also an occasional contributor to the Tatler). All articles concerning pastimes and social events were said to have been written in and sent from ‘White’s coffee-house’; those dealing with poetry from ‘Will’s’; scholarly papers came from ‘The Grecian’; home and foreign affairs from ‘St James’s’. All these coffee-houses really did exist. Other, non-classifiable material, came from Bickerstaff ’s residence. In the following numbers, a host of characters, some of them permanent features, others intermittent guests, occupied the pages of the paper like a middle-class mythology. Swift’s Bickerstaff was an astrologer; Steele supplied him with a servant called Pacolet; Henny Distaff was an imaginary half-sister who, with admirable righteousness, looked after her family together with her husband, called, significantly, Tranquillus. Subjects are presented cyclically, one after the other: duelling, gambling, drunkenness, even wit as the putative endowment of the gentleman; all are examined and defined. Steele seems to resolve the question that has always puzzled the English – the definition of a gentleman; every era has given a different interpretation, largely based on what not to do and what, instead, must be done in the prescribed, urbane manner: Steele emphasizes the importance of a chivalric defence of the gentle sex, and respect for it on the part of all who would call themselves ‘gentlemen’. In article after article, a new ethic of marriage is drawn up, and a new guide for parents on their moral responsibility to educate their children and turn them into upright, conscientious citizens. Number 16 of the Tatler presents, 100 years early, a picture of the Biedermeier happiness of the model family with incredible precision and sharpness of outline. This is not the only pre-emptive Dickensian trait: some of the most effective

5

§ 91.3 n. 17.

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sketches are those that show various aspects of London life – they are like photographs in a documentary, but just ever so slightly deformed, a little ‘otherworldly’, like something out of The Uncommercial Traveller, or, even later, Alexander Smith’s Dreamthorp.6 In number 454, Mr Spectator goes through every hour of the day, recounting every spectacle that meets his eye, the different characters that come on to the scene, and their activities – in short, all the noise and bustle of a busy city. In the coffee-house, too, different audiences gather to hear this or that little despot discourse on the subject of his choosing. Steele rivals Addison in his ability to tell a tale for edification: in the one featuring Yarico and Inkle,7 the cruel English merchant and sailor sells a beautiful slave girl after promising her the world, and making her pregnant, unbeknown to her. It is a kind of rifacimento of Robinson Crusoe, or, rather, an anticipation, in that it pays homage to the noble, generous savage, here, a woman, and constitutes a denunciation of the cruelty and greed inherent in colonialism. § 99. Shaftesbury The first and third Earls of Shaftesbury, grandfather and grandson, shared the same name and surname, Anthony Ashley Cooper. Cooper Senior, who opposed James II’s accession to the throne, was satirized by Dryden as Achitophel in his famous Absalom and Achitophel of 1681. Cooper Junior was born fifty years later, in 1671; he was a disciple of Locke’s but later distanced himself quietly from some of his master’s opinions. When he was about fifteen, he went on a grand tour of France and Italy; he was a member of the House of Commons, and elevated to the Lords when he inherited the title of Earl of Shaftesbury. He became famous for his eloquence, but was forced to give up any further political ambitions he may have had because of ill-health. He therefore turned to the study of philosophy. In the early years of the new century he sought a more suitable climate for his health, first in Holland and then in Italy. He died in Naples in 1713. His most important work is Characteristics 6 7

Volume 4, § 228. See § 231.1 below for a play by Colman with the same title.

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of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711, second edn 1713), a collection of pre-existing essays in which he elaborates a theory of natural religion, and shared nature of moral sense and cosmic order, which he held to be intelligible without the aid of revealed religion. He is, it follows, against all forms of superstition. In a letter on ‘enthusiasm’ (1708), which echoes Swift’s Mechanical Operation, he recommends, against ‘fanatics’, the use, not of violence, but of mockery and irony. In his untidy, digressive, wandering prose, and in a style which is opaque, clouded and rhapsodic (though occasionally poetic), Shaftesbury touches on every aspect of philosophy. In ontology, unlike Hobbes and Mandeville, he does not consider man to be moved by egoism, but by instincts of socialization and collaboration with his fellow creatures. God is not only a first cause but an artist who is forever creating new life. This is Shaftesbury’s fundamental axiom, and the study of philosophy is therefore to discover, in the manner of a demiurge, the essence of creation in what is good and just. As Giordano Bruno said in a different context, philosophy requires love, or intellect aided by feeling. All of creation is good and beautiful; evil exists only as a passing shadow to bring out by contrast the design of a God who would be bad or impotent if he admitted it as an alternative principle. It was Shaftesbury who first wrote the phrase made famous by Keats: ‘All Beauty is Truth’. Ethics and aesthetics come together: just as art is the perception of order in the universe, so ethics reflect the sense of harmony and balance within each individual. Shaftesbury handed down to posterity the concept of this hendiadys, and in this lives on. He was relatively unknown in his lifetime, mainly because he produced so little, but was rediscovered in Europe by the German Romantics, and through them by the English pre-Romantics and Romantics (Coleridge in particular). The rebirth of nature poetry is founded on Shaftesbury’s aesthetics of art as the expression of enthusiasm for the beauty of creation. The Romantics were influenced by the organic concept of nature as moved by an inner force, and of art as an intuitive and creative aspect of the imaginative activity. § 100. Berkeley First a student and then a teacher at Trinity College, Dublin, George Berkeley (1685–1753) was ordained as an Anglican minister and appointed

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dean of Derry in 1724; in 1734 he became, and remained for eighteen years, bishop of Cloyne, a small dioceses in the south of Ireland. His prelatical title is now an integral part of his identity. As an ecclesiastic, he was untiring in fulfilling his pastoral duties, and was supportive of his fellow Irishmen in his writings and in his actions. Were it not for his career as a bishop, it would be hard to think of him as an ecclesiastic philosopher. In Berkeley, religion and philosophy do not interact. He does not write as an apologist for religion, and proposes no theodicy, although, faced with a threatening objection in his argument on the theory of perception, he performs a philosophical sleight of hand and formulates an acrobatic proof of the existence of God. In short, Berkeley is an epistemologist, and the mechanisms of consciousness are the ever-busy theatre of his speculation. He is an asystematic and monographic philosopher, who, for various reasons, leaves several traditional areas of human thought untouched. He lacks a moral philosophy of his own, but only because the second part of Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), which deals with just that, was lost during a journey to Italy, and Berkeley could not bring himself to re-write it. Nor does he discuss aesthetics or politics, so his opus can hardly be called a summa; it is, rather, a manageable corpus divided into quite small units. Throughout his life, his philosophical writings were an expansion, and even a repetition of a number of axioms which he had formulated when young and made notes of. Apart from some grey areas, and a few questions left unanswered, like the distinction between ideas and notions, Berkeley is a philosopher with no appreciable development: the real novelties of his thought were conceived and written down when he was less than thirty years old. He lived until he was sixty-eight, and the remaining years were spent consolidating the basis of these ideas so as to parry the many objections and misunderstandings they had raised. The other side of Berkeley the philosopher is the tireless explorer of the real world, which he greatly desired to know and reform. He wrote several militant pamphlets advocating measures in favour of public health. Unlike Thomas More or Francis Bacon, he tried to turn his utopias into reality with the same reckless, carefree entrepreneurial flair as seen in Defoe or Steele. He displayed the not infrequent, in fact, proverbial, superior management skills of the theoretical philosopher, although he trusted human nature too much and too naïvely.

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While still very young, he made two European tours, the second leading to a four-year stay in Italy, which he visited in all its length and breadth, going as far south as Sicily and Apulia. His experiences are recounted in a travel diary, published posthumously, which is exceptional in its absence of anti-Papist prejudice. His most spectacular exploit was when he left for America in 1728 with the intention of founding a community in Bermuda to edify the colonists and domesticate the ‘natives’. He was kept waiting in Rhode Island for funding, promised by Walpole, which never arrived. He returned unruffled to England, proud of the fact that a Californian university had been named after him. He had been a slave-owner, and therefore not completely ‘enlightened’, but shared with Swift and others the desire for new, regenerating life-blood. He wrote the prophetic words: ‘Westward the course of empire takes its way’. 2. As in the case of Shaftesbury, for Berkeley the point of departure but not of arrival, was Locke. His first completed work, New Theory of Vision (1709), bears this out. At first reading this is a very challenging text: its objective is to deny the primary qualities of the perceived object, such as distance, size and extension, since these do not belong to the object but are our interpretations of them, and vary from subject to subject, and depend on experience and habit. In order to demonstrate this, Berkeley often resorts to the example of the blind man who recovers his sight, and does not recognize the geometrical forms that he could identify by touch before. Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), later re-written in the form of an exquisite dialogic synthesis in Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, aims at invalidating the premises of Newtonian science and the materialistic theory of the universe, which sees matter as distinct from mind. So what relation is there between ideas and the objects they represent? None, says Berkeley, because ideas are things. The famous axiom, ‘esse est percipi’, is, however, less obvious: Berkeley is not saying that things do not exist; he maintains that they have no real existence independently of their being perceived. In other words, the mind works, elaborates information, and in general, is active; things, on the other hand exist passively. Ideas themselves are of three types or categories: pure reception of sense data; mental reelaboration of these same sense data by means of feelings (sic) and mental operations; ideas formed with the help of memory and the imagination.

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Ideas may be simple or combined, and every object is a collection of separable sensations. One of the most suggestive riders of Berkeley’s theory of knowledge is that there are no such things as general sensations, but only momentary, individual ones; nor are there essences or substrata. The reason he insists so strongly on this point is that to accept the existence of matter would be tantamount to admitting it is infinite and unchanging, and this would open the door to atheism.1 As I suggested above, the mechanism of perception is coordinated (only superficially can it be seen as a case of cause and effect) by a superior mind. In postulating the ordered disposition of ideas as being the work of such an Author, Berkeley gets two birds with one stone, and proves, deistically, the existence of God; he also provides proof. Alciphron, written in 1721 on his return from America, is composed of seven dialogues between Euphranor and Crito and other free-thinking philosophers, whose Greek names mask, among others, Mandeville and Shaftesbury; it is, therefore, a defence of religion against free-thinkers. Siris (1744) is a curious book, which starts by illustrating the medicinal qualities of tar water, but then branches off on to various, quite different subjects, turning into a series of digressions in the manner of Thomas Browne. 3. Swaggering, assertive as he is, and, one might think, daring in his criticism of Newton, Berkeley failed to impress his contemporaries, who considered him a particularly specious sophist who presumed to demonstrate the truth of his assertions with ingenious examples, cleverly constructed parables, and arguments that were eccentric when not completely wrong. His philosophy has been more laughed at than admired ever since Dr Johnson famously refuted it by kicking a stone to prove that it really did exist. In modern times, Bertrand Russell was almost dismissive, stating that nothing Berkeley wrote after the age of twenty-eight was of any value, and that, of the three dialogues of Hylas and Philonous, only the first and part of the second are worth talking about. In fact, towards no other philosopher is Russell more critical and demanding, relentlessly looking for flaws in his arguments; to prove his point, he highlights the confused and incomplete definition of the term ‘existence’ as used by Berkeley. Yet,

1

In section 92 of the treatise.

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Berkeley provided the initial input for Hume, and was studied by Kant, Coleridge, and Mill. A complete edition of his works was re-published in 1871, and since then he has always been at the centre of philosophical studies in England. Mach and Popper, and even Lenin, thought highly of him. 4. Here, as usual, we are interested in the literary aspect of the philosopher, and his reception outside the purely heuristic field. In London, Berkeley was, for a time, part of the circle of Swift and Pope and wrote occasional articles for The Guardian. The prose of his philosophical works has received widespread acclaim: it is clear, flowing, far from verbose, with flashes of irony and satire, restrained, essential, but not without a certain musicality and sense of rhythm, qualities not strictly necessary in that particular kind of text. Saintsbury2 goes so far as to contradict Johnson when he says that he, Berkeley, is the true master of English style, not Addison; or at least he is the master of philosophical prose, especially in dialogue form, as exemplified by Hylas and Philonous. For the Romantics, Siris was his most intriguing work, because nature is a series of sensations and a book of ciphers that reveals God. Yeats, too, admired him, and saw in him a revitalizer of European spirituality (as René Wellek said). His emphasis on the inimitable particularity of each sensation – always new, individual, itself: ‘this perceiving, active being, is what I call mind, spirit, soul, or myself ’ – might be considered a distant anticipation of Hopkins’s ‘inscape’. § 101. Joseph Butler Though born a Presbyterian, Joseph Butler (1692–1752) became an Anglican minister and bishop of Bristol, then dean of St Paul’s and, subsequently, bishop of Durham. He spent his life vigorously defending the orthodoxy of revealed truth against the religious rationalism of the deists. In 1726 he published fifteen sermons, and in 1748, six more, which were widely praised by contemporaries and later generations. In them he acknowledged the egoism and weakness that lie at the heart of all human beings (Mandeville held the same conviction), but confided in the possibility of regeneration provided by conscience. Between these two books, in 1734,

2

SAI, 546.

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he published his most famous theological work, The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature, based on the same psychological premises. This is not, in fact, a triumphal apology, but a suffering, tormented acquisition of guarantees that are, at the most, probable, but not certain: in an amply descriptive piece published in Last Essays (1877), Matthew Arnold declared his dissatisfaction with Butler’s work. In his opinion, it lacks epieikeia, that sweet, persuasive reasonableness that, alone, can lead man to the Christian faith. Butler argues always e contrario, not on the basis of proof, thought to be incontrovertible, of the dogmas of revealed religion, but on the repeated axiom that there are no serious contrary reasons why one should not believe them. His consciousness of the precariousness of the human condition, of truth, and of language itself that is used to find out this truth, brings Butler in line with Pascal. Within man there is an abyss, but hope persists that the concept of good may find a way. 2. It should never be forgotten that Butler’s treatise is addressed, not to atheists or agnostics, but to deists, and that the debate does not start from zero but from a common ground of shared beliefs. The God of deists, always defined as ‘the moral and intelligent governor of nature’, does not need to be ‘proved’ all over again. ‘God’ is the God of the Bible and of the Christian religion as revealed therein. The first analogy is that the hypothesis of nature unassisted by Revelation – a mass of phenomena of which we do not know the causes – entails obstacles to understanding which are equal to those faced in arguing nature with Revelation. God punishes evil and rewards good, as happens in the ‘system of nature’, but not all accounts are settled in this life, and we probably have to wait for the life to come. Already in this life we are being tested. More traditionally, in the second part, Butler turns to the defence of the historical truth of Scriptures, and miracles as proof of Revelation. He contests the accusation that God imposes commandments that are against nature, or performs actions that are unworthy of a divinity. If, in the end, the deist doubts natural religion, he should declare himself an atheist. Analogy is the only road to knowledge of the transcendent, and it is on this slender premise that Butler evokes a religious, not a negative, existentialism: for a superior intelligence, everything is clear and distinct; for an inferior one the probability is for an asymptote of complete knowledge of the divine.

§ 102. Mandeville

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3. Each chapter of the treatise is a sui generis sermon that deals with one of the points summarized in the title in bare, colourless prose, devoid of imagery and humour, dragging on monotonously, and offering no encouragement to the reader to continue in the hope of finding some hidden beauty. It might be called a ‘rumination’, as T. S. Eliot thought the poetry of Tennyson and Browning to be. In his day Butler had more critics than admirers, but enjoyed a revival a century later, when he was rediscovered by the Victorians, who identified with his concept of God’s design and the very essence of the truths of religion and of life after death, as being hidden by a veil, an image dear to their frame of mind and used by many writers, like Tennyson:1 without the protection of this veil man would be blinded by the glare of truth. Reason, once more, was impotent: it was necessary to submit to the will of God. § 102. Mandeville Of a French family, but born in Holland, Bernard [de] Mandeville (1670– 1733) graduated in medicine from the famous University of Leiden, where English doctors often came to specialize. After settling in London in 1696, and marrying an English woman, he started a practice, and in the course of the years mastered the English language. After a few trifling attempts, in 1705 he published, anonymously, a poem entitled The Grumbling Hive, or Knaves Turned Honest, republished in 1713, accompanied by a long prose commentary, under the title of The Fable of the Bees, and the sub-heading ‘or, private vices, public benefits’. Various additions were made in the way of glosses, notes and apologies in a series of editions up to 1733, and throughout the century his Fable enjoyed considerable success, despite being banned by the Grand Jury of Middlesex. Not long after, we find Johnson acknowledging the disautomatizing usefulness of his work in terms of ethics, economics and politics. Much later, Browning, rather enigmatically, dedicated to Mandeville one of the ‘parleyings’ in his penultimate work.2 Adam Smith, physiocrats, utilitarians, anarchists, all saw in him the pioneer of modern economic thought. The

1 2

Volume 4, § 5.3. Arnold, and also Bagehot and Pattison, had an interest in Butler and left an essay on him. Volume 6, § 23.

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loud, and often abusive opposition to his work raised by the various early eighteenth-century optimistic philosophies lasted for twenty years or more after publication. The simple, clear thesis of Mandeville’s Fable lies in the 400 limping octosyllabic lines of 1705, which paraphrase Hobbes and Machiavelli, and purport to seek the real truth of things, without metaphysical or finalistic pretences. The hive represents society, which prospers thanks to the ability of the bees to accumulate goods; the love of luxury is a public virtue, not a vice, because it keeps the standard of living high. As long as each bee looks to its own interest without scruples, the community seems ‘a Paradise’. Then Jupiter decides to give heed to the repeated, selfdestructive requests by the bees to put an end to the prevailing corruption. Honesty brings with it poverty after abundance, and the society of bees is virtually wiped out. In the prose commentary this nucleus is argued with abundance of examples. In the field of ethics, Mandeville exposes the ulterior motives, like vanity and self-indulgence, that hide behind every so-called virtue. In a purely political context, he recognizes that the springboard for progress and well-being in society and in the individual lies in egoism, while the so-called virtues would remove all such stimulus. Historically speaking, the false opposition between vice and virtue was, according to Mandeville, deliberately created by priests and politicians in order to profit by other people’s work and ‘indulge their own Appetites with less disturbance’. On an economic level, the greater the demand, the more wealth and employment created. The altruism preached by public morals goes against the instinct of self-preservation and is therefore harmful to society. The gospel of laissezfaire economics – mors tua vita mea – is already present in Mandeville, who postulates, however, a counter-measure to economistic anarchy, in which the more one cheats, the more one earns and prospers, thanks to a superior organism that keeps these vectors in a state of equilibrium. Another important codicil is that trade, crafts, science and the arts, especially architecture and painting, would draw great benefits from vices. So Mandeville makes affirmations that constitute a clear, isolated cry of disagreement with the opinions and theories of Steele, Addison, and other educators, as well as with the optimistic philosophy of Shaftesbury and the deists. Steele, in particular, is subjected to close criticism, and axiom after axiom dissected and denied, starting with those regarding pride and egoism, which the founder

§ 102. Mandeville

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of the Tatler proposed to uproot. After counter-attacks by Hutcheson and Law, Berkeley came out in 1732 with his rebuttal.3 Mandeville’s arguments are reminiscent of those of Swift: see, for instance, the specious demonstration that to save a child that has fallen into a fire, one burns one’s hand, and so, because of the instinct of self-preservation, one will refrain from saving the child. William Law believed he had found a definitive counterargument in the accusation that Mandeville considered man to be nothing but an animal, which is, indeed the idea put forward by Swift in Part IV of Gulliver. Mandeville’s Fable applies rigorous consequential arguments that start, however, from premises that are false or debatable. He has been defined, with a useful neologism, a ‘paradoxmonger’, a term that could be applied to Swift as well, or to G. B. Shaw, who, in a way, resembles him. Mandeville is a gainsayer, ready to dissect and destroy everyone and everything; he was quick to descry a false conscience behind human actions, and wrote further denunciations, amongst them one against schools for the children of the poor, talk of which prevented people from concentrating on more serious and more urgent problems; not to mention the money wasted on such schools, which would have been better spent on higher education. In short, the children of the poor had to stay poor.4 As in all utopian and revolutionary constructs, Mandeville presents an abstract state built on criteria never before used, and therefore untested. Furthermore, the theory that the state and all its citizens are better off because of vice, or immorality, or illegality, in the system, is disproved by the very Puritanism that Mandeville attacks, given that, as is generally thought, the industrial and economic development of England owes much to individualistic capitalism, widely supposed to be blessed by God. However, there is no doubt that in a society with no moral restraints, vice enriches and feeds the economy: Mandeville was not in a position to avail himself of obvious examples of this ‘law’, like prostitution,5 3 4 5

Faced with this barrage of criticism, Mandeville retracted in part, and toned down his affirmations in the second part of the Fable, published in 1729, in the form of a preface plus six dialogues. CHI, vol. IX, 407. Mandeville does expressly mention various economic spin-offs from prostitution, especially in the clothing industry.

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drugs, and illegal gambling. But he is aware that new trades and occupations appear and prosper in response to needs that are not immoral, but simply induced, and practically superfluous, like our modern boom in computer technology, mobile phones, and everything digital: once the induced need has been satisfied, and fashions change, then certain temporary skills can no longer find a market. Result: unemployment. § 103. Law The Anglican minister and long-term theologian, William Law (1686– 1761), was the principal, if not only real adversary and opponent of eighteenth-century deism, and founder of one of its antitheses: mysticism. He sowed the seeds of Methodism, and grafted onto English spirituality and culture the theosophy, until then little known, of the German shoemaker, Jacob Boehme. It was through Law that Blake discovered the strange riches of Boehme. In order to become the champion of mysticism, Law had to take on the principal theological schools of thought of the time and their representatives. He did this boldly and openly, throwing himself wholeheartedly into the fray. Apart from one work, the rest of his immense production has been forgotten, but he remains an indispensable purveyor (symbolic and concrete at the same time) of the philosophy and theological issues of his day; indeed, many protagonists of the world of culture knew him and benefited from his advice and influence. He was one of the ‘non-jurors’ who kept faith with the Stuarts when the Hanovers came to power; his three letters to Archbishop Hoadly of Bangor (they supported authoritarianism in the Church and gave rise to the so-called ‘Bangorian controversy’)1 earned him suspension from office. He then went to London and became tutor to Gibbon’s father; this gave him the opportunity to become acquainted, indirectly, with the future historian, who gave an objective account of him in his autobiography. The other two historical adversaries of Law were, besides Latitudinarianism, optimistic deism and sceptical pessimism. Law clashed with Shaftesbury on the cognitive claims for reason, and added that all is not clear in the universe and in the 1

Hoadly maintained that religion consisted essentially in an individual’s relationship with God, and swept away all the so-called ‘trappings’ of institutionalized worship.

§ 104. Other deists

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human soul: in fact, there is more mystery than light. A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728) is a manual divided into twenty-four chapters that indicate the steps towards the sanctification of everyday life through meditation and prayer; there are frequent references to imaginary characters with meaningful names like Flavia, Miranda, Calidus or Eusebia, and their responses to the temptations of the world. Thanks to his confidential appeals to the reader, and his easy, flowing style, quite devoid of anything vaguely sanctimonious, Law was praised by Johnson, and was soon one of the classics of English spiritual literature, second only to the Bible and Bunyan. Gradually, however, it became just one of the many books that are more admired and mentioned than actually read. After post-Romantic secularization, references to Law began to lose their shine, and doubts as to his qualities appear, until readers and critics nearer to us in time showed themselves to be frankly indifferent to him. In conclusion, let me summarize his claims to fame: not only did he introduce the English to Boehme, rub shoulders with Gibbon, and prepare the path for Wesley’s Methodism; he also formed a small group of writers much influenced by mysticism, such as the eccentric, easy-going, eclectic, John Byrom (1692–1763), and Henry Brooke (1703–1783), both poets. § 104. Other deists A central point in philosophy and religion in the early eighteenth century was Revelation: numerous tracts and treatises were written representing a variety of nuances between the two main poles: its uselessness or superfluity on the one hand, and on the other, the possibility, or indeed the necessity of reconciling it with pure rationalism.1 The main pioneering work of reference for English deists was Christianity not Mysterious (1696) by the Irishman, John Toland (1670–1722), who was admired by Leibniz but berated at home and subjected to bans, persecution and ideological 1

Samuel Clarke (CHI, vol. IX, 292 n. 1) divided deists into four types: the first considered God a supreme being who created the world and then washed his hands of it; the second recognized the workings of divine providence in nature; the third attributed moral perfection to God; the fourth subscribed to the Butlerian system of prizes and punishments in this life and in the life to come.

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lynching, so much so that his book was burned in public in front of the Parliament in Dublin. Toland brings all religion within the confines of reason, leaving nothing to the dark realm of mystery. This formed a precedent for Bishop Joseph Butler, who later was to distance himself from the thesis that religious truths can be fully known and understood by man. Also Thomas Woolston (1669–1733) raised the question of miracles, denying their authenticity and credibility. Anthony Collins (1676–1729) composed a discourse on free thought (1709) that entailed not only a criticism of absurd, ungrounded ideas, but turned into an attack on priests and Catholicism, using as ammunition the Inquisitorial trial of Galileo. Samuel Clarke (1675– 1729) was, together with Joseph Butler, the main bastion against deism, with his treatise supporting the thesis of the demonstrability of the existence and attributes of God, although not of his essence. The apology of the Christian religion (1731) by James Foster, pointed out that nothing prevents God from revealing himself to only one particular people. Despite declaring himself a true believer, Matthew Tindal (1657–1733) considered reason the only legitimate criterion of judgement. deism pervades other activities of the time that are not directly connected with theology. Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), educated at Glasgow University, was a moralist and believer in natural law, and a follower of Grotius and Locke. He also investigated the genesis of the ideas of beauty and virtue in the form of a spontaneous, or inborn, sense of regularity, uniformity and variety, while the moral sense brings more elevated pleasures deriving from doing good to others. Unlike in Hobbes, the social contract is not the outcome of a need to curb human selfishness, but springs from the desire to further the happiness of others. This theory was to be perfected by the utilitarians. Newtonian mechanics is reconciled with theology in David Hartley (1705–1757), founder of associationist psychology and the physiology of sensation. § 105. Lady Winchilsea When, in an appendix to the Preface of the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth hailed a kindred soul in the person of Anne Finch, poet, née Kingsmill, later Lady Winchilsea (1661–1720), he was taken to task for his precipitousness. He singled her out as ‘a Poet’ whose eye ‘had been steadily fixed upon [her] object’ and whose feelings ‘had urged [her] to work […] in the spirit of

§ 105. Lady Winchilsea

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genuine imagination’. She marked for him a new development in eighteenthcentury poetry: while preserving some poetic conventions, she had rejected others, opening the door to sensibility after the Augustan monopoly of the cool control of reason. She constitutes a trait d’union between Pope on one side, and, on the other, Young, Thomson, Ossian and Gray. Lady Winchilsea does indeed almost throb with the intimate earnestness of a crepuscular melancholy that springs from an awareness of all that is sensuous, picturesque, and even, sepulchral. Classical grace and elegance are shattered by piercing cries and desperate panting that foreshadow, in a way, Keats and, mainly, Shelley. Words are inadequate to express the turmoil of the human soul, and the tremblings of a Sehnsucht never heard before.1 At the same time, she is one of the first poets to investigate not only the poetic art as such, but also the very act of writing, with a rare metapoetic awareness and ability to overturn the male perspective. Miscellany Poems, hailed by today’s feminists as the most important work of poetry written by a woman in the eighteenth century, appeared in 1713, when women simply did not publish. Her poetry circulated in small, restricted circles of male and female poets. Her compositions centre on the historical discrimination against women, excluded from public office and confined to certain fixed roles on society. She crystallizes a number of traits that would come to represent women’s writing in the future. The titles of many of her poems, with their evocation of the dream mode, already point to an important theme: the need to escape from a long period of imprisonment, and the suspicion of male infidelity, which, as a reaction, spurs women towards morbid female friendships. In order to become an author, a woman must necessarily choose a mask to wear – first Orinda,2 then Ardelia, and so on, down to the acronyms and pseudonyms used by the Brontë sisters as a necessary shield. Ardelia, too, is a nomen omen, but the ‘ardent’ Lady Winchilsea is a pioneer of the psychotic, hypochondriac, melancholy, splenetic, moody school of women’s poetry.3 After Wordsworth, Lady Winchilsea was praised by Arnold and 1 2 3

As in ‘Petition for an Absolute Retreat’, featuring figs, the (also Hopkins’s) ‘velvet peach’ and strawberries. § 40.2. She acknowledges all these characteristics in her self-diagnostic poem, The Spleen.

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Gosse, and in the early twentieth century a complete edition of her works was edited and printed, and is, up to the present day, the only ‘Complete Works of Lady Winchilsea’.4 Virginia Woolf ’s excellent sponsorship in 1928 in A Room of One’s Own did nothing to consolidate her position, and did not prevent a number of authoritative male readers from underlining the acritical nature of Wordsworth’s praise, and finding Winchilsea’s poetic reputation to be exaggerated and undeserved. Today it is still possible to read occasional examples of critical demolition of her works, as well as the opposite: some praise her to the heavens, others put her where they think she belongs, on a distant, hard-to-reach library shelf. However, the negative consensus is no more, according to which ‘her forte was in gay and complimentary verse of the occasional order’.5 2. The young Anne Kingsmill became a lady-in-waiting to James II’s queen, together with Sarah Churchill and Anne Killigrew. In 1684 she married a colonel whom she adored, and to whom she wrote a number of devout and trusting conjugal poems. She was forced to step down from her position at court on the accession of William of Orange (both she and her husband were Jacobites). In London she had been admired by Pope; in the quiet of the Kent countryside, her poetry blossomed, and she gradually gained strength and confidence in all kinds of metre, contents, and genre. She wrote a number of plays not meant for the stage, Aesopian fables reminiscent of La Fontaine (almost a third of the total), which may have occasioned those by Gay, and some Pindaric odes. The introduction to the 1713 edition of her poetry is a pre-emptive attack on the foreseeable reaction of those critics who, seeing the name and gender of the author, would no doubt condemn the invasion of a traditionally male territory (poetry), by a woman. They might not even bother to read the poems. The denunciation hits out against the idea of the woman as the ‘angel in the house’ à la Coventry Patmore, whose static, mummified beauty bewitches men. This version of womanhood is contrasted with the biblical female prophet, Deborah (evidently, Lady Winchilsea was unaware of later interpretations 4 5

Poems, ed. A. M. Reynolds, Chicago 1903. CHI, vol. IX, 169. A revaluation of the Aesopian fables, which develop a truly revolutionary critique of society, is now under way.

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of the Old Testament as a document aimed at bolstering the patriarchal system). She glorifies the positions of leadership and command awarded to women, or at least not expressly forbidden, in Hebrew law. In her day, women had to remain hidden in order not to be scorned, but it is the poem itself that proudly and boldly denies this. The best-known and mostquoted poem by Winchilsea is ‘Nocturnal Reverie’, with its scholastic, prim elegance, and many traces of Pope’s poetic diction, in, for example, the repeated structure of a noun preceded by some trite, worn-out adjective, or, on a syntactic level, the use of a kind of oratio perpetua – forty or more lines without a full stop, starting from the very beginning, ‘In such a night, when …’, followed by a list of various sights and phenomena, some conventional and stereotyped, others exceptionally striking, like the horse that draws nearer and nearer ‘until torn-up forage in his teeth we hear’.6 The poem is based on that most Romantic of topoi – found in Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and Foscolo’s sonnet to evening – the stillness of the evening or night that brings with it a host of associations, fantastications, multi-coloured flashes of things remembered or others that never were. Novalis is there, too, with his night time that soothes all pain, until morning comes and desire awakes for ‘pleasures, seldom reached, again pursued’. § 106. Thomson* I: The theophany of nature James Thomson (1700–1748, usually specified as ‘author of The Seasons’, to distinguish him from others with the same name) is a new kind of poet: first of all, he was a Scot who moved to London, thereby obtaining a notoriety and publicity he would not have enjoyed had he stayed in his native 1

6

In this case, Lady Winchilsea is not guilty of the fault she is accused of by admirers like Middleton Murry and Virginia Woolf: verbosity.

*

J. Sambrook is the editor of the modern editions of The Seasons and The Castle of Indolence (with other poems), respectively Oxford 1981 and Oxford 1986; Letters and Documents, ed. A. D. McKillop, Lawrence, KS 1958. Thomson’s plays have not been re-published recently. A. D. McKillop, The Background of Thomson’s ‘Seasons’, Minneapolis, MN 1942, and The Background of Thomson’s ‘Liberty’, Houston, TX

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land; Dr Johnson provides an attractive portrait of him, though not without the inevitable barbed comment. This picture of him helped form the idea of Thomson present in the collective imagination: a character from some sketch or other, or some insignificant novel; a ‘caricature’, a ‘case’. He was naïve and gullible, always with his head in the clouds. He committed faux pas after faux pas, and was always short of money, also because he regularly forgot to collect his salary from the sinecures his noble protectors procured for him. He was plump, and, in the course of time, stooped; slothful and, preferably, silent, he thawed in company; he loved eating and drinking, and would keep late hours with friends. He was always sweating, and had a stock of wigs that became so greasy and dishevelled that they had to be taken to the wigmaker to be made wearable again. In some situations, however, such as when he had a poem to sell, he was anything but lazy and laissezfaire. His education was obviously divergent from the norm for writers: the son of a Presbyterian minister, he grew up in the Scottish Cheviots, which were to remain part of him his whole life. Intended for the ministry, when his father died he felt the call of poetry, and before he was fifteen, under the guidance of a local smallholder who was also an amateur poet, he was writing poetry and systematically burning what he wrote at the end of each year. His mother took on the job of educating her son, and went with him to Edinburgh, where he became a student of theology. One of his professors happened to raise a polite objection to his summary and analysis of a psalm; Thomson was so mortified by this that he went no further in his ecclesiastical career. His first attempts at poetry, too, were criticized in the Edinburgh milieu. So, without taking his degree, like Carlyle and John Davidson (a quite different poet to him), in 1725 he moved to London,



1951; D. Grant, James Thomson: Poet of ‘The Seasons’, London 1951; P. M. Spacks, The Varied God: A Critical Study of Thomson’s ‘The Seasons’, Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles 1959, and The Poetry of Vision: Five Eighteenth-Century Poets, Cambridge, MA 1967, 13–65; R. Cohen, The Art of Discrimination: Thomson’s ‘The Seasons’ and the Language of Criticism, Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles 1964, and The Unfolding of ‘The Seasons’, Baltimore, MD 1970; R. R. Agrawal, Tradition and Experiment in the Poetry of James Thomson (1700–1748), Salzburg 1981; M. J. W. Scott, James Thomson, Anglo-Scot, Athens, GA 1988; J. Sambrook, James Thomson, 1700–1748: A Life, Oxford 1991.

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a courageous and enterprising move. Johnson describes the arrival in the capital of the boy from the provinces, who, with eyes wide open, manages to lose (or be robbed of ) his documents, and who is at a loss as to how to buy a new pair of shoes. But in his pocket he had ‘Winter’: it was urgent to find patrons. One of the four Seasons was dedicated to a countess with literary pretensions, who was in the habit of inviting to her estate, every year, some eminent poet to read her own verses. Thomson spent most of his time drinking with the duke and his entourage and was not invited back. By the time he was thirty he had confounded those who thought he would come to nothing, and had written and published one of his masterpieces and other noteworthy compositions. A trip to Italy as the tutor of the son of the future Lord Chancellor, Sir Charles Talbot, inspired the poem, Liberty; five plays on historical and mythological subjects, among which Sophonisba1 and Agamemnon, appeared at irregular intervals after 1728. In collaboration with the Scottish poet, Mallet, he composed the masque, Alfred, which features the famous anthem, Rule Britannia, set to music by Arne. In 1748 The Castle of Indolence was published. The last twenty years of his life really were spent in relative indolence, in the peaceful suburb of Richmond, where he had bought an estate.2 He died at the early age of forty-eight after catching cold during a boat trip on the Thames, while returning from an unsuccessful expedition to woo an unidentified ‘Amanda’. 2. Thomson and Pope were, if not of the same age, at least contemporaries in the sense that they were writing in the same period. It is, therefore, natural to see in Thomson almost a revolutionary alternative to Pope, starting from his choice of metrical form, in that he breaks the monopoly of the heroic couplet and returns to blank verse. He looks for inspiration to models that by then were passé, Virgil, and, more importantly, Milton and Spenser; he also shifts the focus of poetry from the town to the country and the world of nature, and seeks a wider audience than the cultured elite 1 In La ‘Sophonisba’ di James Thomson, Bari 2000, G. D’Elia discusses the undeserved judgement of mediocrity that has dogged this play. 2 His income came from a number of sinecures, among which that of surveyor general of the Leeward Islands, a position subcontracted to a deputy, as Thomas Moore did, so that it was not necessary to actually go to and reside in those islands.

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of the court. So, more than the young Pope of Windsor Forest, Thomson is the herald of Romantic sensibility and the Romantic perception of nature. With him, nature poetry bursts onto the scene while Pope, Gay and Swift – urban, indeed London, poets – were engaged in their literary – and political – wars and skirmishes, using satire and the pamphlet, pedantry and arrogance, as weapons against their enemies. It would be short-sighted, however, to define Thomson as merely a landscape poet: as a convinced and devout Presbyterian, he was also a writer of religious verse. In him, the messianic and revolutionary message of Romanticism is anticipated, veiled and submerged in his view of nature. Apocalyptic and utopian, Thomson cannot write an explicit theodicy in an age of reason. In his first masterpiece, The Seasons, good is continuously threatened by forces symbolized by tumultuous atmospheric agents that are subsequently calmed. In the second, allegory takes the place of what might have been a satire. In his third most famous poem, Liberty, civilization is achieved and preserved by curbing man’s propensity for greed, luxury, lust, and tyranny. Of course, the ‘prophetic’ side of Thomson should not be exaggerated, and indeed it is counterbalanced by several factors. Thomson’s revolution is in fact conservation, or nostalgia for ancient feudal and agrarian codes of behaviour; the universe he retrieves and reconstructs responds to the coordinates of Augustan objectivity, among which, however, are many curious options that make him a groundbreaker: for example, he is, effectively, a visual poet, but in a very specific sense, for he is fully aware of the ongoing studies by Berkeley and Newton concerning the physiological aspects of perception. Taine thought Thomson put into words the paintings of the eighteenthcentury picturesque, as well as suggesting others, like Rubens’s, for the depth and richness of his colours; at his worst, he resembles, says Taine, the personifications and abstractions of, among others, Jacques-Louis David.3 The possible parallels between Thomson’s poetry and genre painting are, however, too numerous to be counted. But Thomson is even more specifically a musical poet; he became famous outside of England when a German translation of The Seasons was set to music by Haydn. Most people think

3

TAI, vol. III, 372–4.

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automatically of Vivaldi’s Quattro stagioni (each section is accompanied by a sonnet), which appeared almost at the same time (Vivaldi in 1725). It would be difficult to count the examples of programme music dedicated to one or all four seasons written before, during, and after Thomson’s time. ‘Music’ is a term that should be defined in a less vague and approximate way. The lack of method, the random heaping up of different material, with consequent changes and leaps in the register, was the main tenor of the objections raised by Johnson, who pointed out, however, that Thomson had personalized Milton’s metre, and thought and written in an original manner, without imitating, or lifting lines and passages from other poets, and using both the telescope and the microscope. As regards his style, it is widely thought that Thomson is an ‘easy’ poet, flowing, not over-refined, who comes up with the most awful linguistic ‘inventions’ (like ‘irriguous’4 and ‘convolutions’) and turns out lines that might be held up as benchmarks of the anti-poetic. Stylistically, The Seasons has been neither understood nor appreciated. It is not, strictly speaking, a poem based on an argument, but Pindaric and rhapsodic. There are whole sections that consist of poetry at its purest, in which the divine afflatus has breathed forth verses redolent of Milton and Marlowe, with endless lists of high-sounding names – exotic lands and distant, mysterious latitudes, made more vivid by idiolect, coinage, ingenious compounds, not to mention Latinisms and technical terms, merging in a great mixtura verborum. Recent scholars have turned their attention to aspects of Thomson that were not considered relevant in his own day: he is seen today as a postcolonial writer who has left the periphery and migrated to the centre, and, more suggestively, as a Scot at the time of the annexation of his country by England (1707). Some may regret that Thomson, born so close to the borders of the empire of the time, develops no political consciousness, and is untouched by the instances of nationalism and separatism: he is an imperialist poet without realizing it. His theatre is, indeed, political, but at times reads like a vehicle for imperial propaganda. Liberty glorifies Britain’s imperial destiny, and repeats the

4

Geoffrey Tillotson includes this adjective in his list of Virgilian loan words in English neoclassical poetry.

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much-used allegory of the shifting of world imperium from east to west, and from west to north. 3. The Seasons grew in time, with modifications in the title and in the underlying philosophy, so that the last edition (1746) consisted of 5,500 lines. It was popular from the start, and, by 1800, had been re-printed fifty times. In it, the prevailing deism was superseded in part, because, as in the case of the Romantics, and, before them, of the Metaphysical and Baroque writers, and later, of the Victorians, nature is viewed, sacramentally, as ‘the book of God’.5 The poem is ‘Miltonic’ not only from a prosodic point of view, as it propounds a theology brought in line with an age in which the divine presence in the universe could no longer be relegated to the biblical account of Creation, but was to be sought and seen in the actual created world. The Seasons is Paradise Lost fifty years after, though its four books refer back to the structure of Paradise Regained. Thomson hides, or at least does not make triumphantly explicit, the fact that nature is the arena for an ongoing struggle between good and evil, both in history in general, and in the micro-context of the single seasons. Milton could not be repeated and re-written as such: Thomson provides a parallel. In The Castle of Indolence, too, we find a duel between a negative, demonic principle – indolence – and a positive one, the ‘knight’, a duel which ends with the initiation, or resumption, of a process of civilization and moralization. Significantly, late nineteenth-century editions of Thomson’s poetry had a very ‘biblical’ look about them, with covers in black leather or imitation leather, gilt edges, red-framed text; or they might have been taken for a missal, like Christina Rossetti’s Complete Poems.6 On a political level, Thomson sees the possibility of salvation for a degenerate social model in agrarian civilization and in the figures of the patriarchs, the various messiahs, and the great condottieri of history. He appears to posit a cyclical theory of history, as found in Vico,

5

6

Curtius (CEL, 302–47) misses out on a great opportunity by not inserting Thomson in his famous study of the recurrence of this topos. Almost all scholars agree, on the basis of admissions contained in his letters, that Thomson became an agnostic after leaving Edinburgh, though with the same kind of ambiguity we find in Carlyle. The poetic text tells a different story. Cf. for instance J. Thomson, Poetical Works, ed. W. M. Rossetti, London 1873.

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with a Gibbonian movement of rising and falling: once a civilization has reached its peak it is destined to decline. Such, he thought, was the danger facing England. 4. The poet is imagined visiting the countryside, one season after the other: he observes, categorizes, recollects in tranquillity, exclaims and rejoices, becomes serious, protests, denounces and inveighs, only to burst out again into ecstatic hymns of praise at the unceasing renewal of nature. The ‘I’ of the poem is a mask, although there are sudden transitions to a more identifiable ‘I’, a historical one, and even an autobiographical persona, who removes his gaze from nature and sings of his love for ‘Amanda’; bewitched, he picks flowers for her and imagines the two of them as a new Adam and Eve. Certain elements link the four parts together, the first of which is, obviously, spring. The inevitable protasis is followed by the dedication to an important nobleman and a meteorological and astronomical description of the season.7 Each ‘season’ begins with a rhapsodic movement of Pindaric flights, and a series of digressions, anecdotes, sketches and panegyrics, or even separate odes on a particular theme, such as the one at the beginning of ‘Summer’, on the life-giving sun; there are also sudden solemn addresses, for example, in praise of English liberty and the nation of Britain that was the terror of Papists, mistress of the seas, and beacon of civilization. Such an ability to form associations verges on the gratuitous. The weather in summer, for example, conjures up in the poet’s mind the tropical heat of Africa and exotic wild beasts. Thomson then seems to change the subject altogether, and launches an appeal for more humane prisons. He inserts the delightful anecdotes of Celadon and Amelia, the latter struck by lightning, and of Damon who spies on Musidora while bathing, both aroused by the breaking storm. All of a sudden, we are treated to a pageant of great English navigators, colonizers and poet-patriots like Sidney, Spenser and Chaucer. ‘Spring’ is born as a kaleidoscope of atmospheric spectacles at the equinox, and inspects the activities that are carried out in the countryside on her arrival. ‘Summer’, instead, describes the various phenomena in the arc of a summer’s day. In 7

At the beginning of ‘Summer’ there is an explicit reference to the theories of the celestial motions that account for the seasons.

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‘Autumn’ the harvest takes centre stage, with the parenthetical presence of the chase, which inspires in soft-hearted Thomson authentic compassion for the victims of this ‘sport of kings’. The birds that populate the skies of ‘Autumn’ are mostly Scottish. As I mentioned, Thomson proves himself to be a master of minute, microscopic, almost Linnean description. His subjects are those of genre painting – waterfalls, brooks, groves, storms followed by clear skies. Indeed, they become ekphrases of inexistent or possible pictures: the farmyard where a sleeping dog is stung by wasps, or the ox that swats the flies away with his tail. Each of these cameos is different yet the same, thanks to the many minute, almost invisible, details skilfully rendered in appropriate language. A ‘botanical’ poet in the real sense of the word, Thomson names and enumerates flowers with definitions that fill him with extended bouts of ecstasy.8 5. The symbolic and allegorical rhythm of nature is that of an order dictated and handed down ab aeterno, threatened, at times overturned by storms – cracks in the structure – that, every time, are successfully weathered. The solar year is a chain, in which each season prepares the way for the next, and everything is held together. This idea informs another famous piece of music on the theme of the seasons, Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. ‘Busy quietness’ is celebrated, or more often, invoked, as the state to which England should aspire. Thomson is fascinated, but also terrified, by anything that might arouse violent passions. Extreme heat frightens him as much as the Arctic cold, and the lion, tiger and panther throw him into a panic, while he admires the placid, calm-tempered elephant. More explicitly, he extols the temperate sun of England. Johnson thought that Thomson’s verse was a special, different kind of blank verse; yet it is solemn, swollen, rich, and deals with great cosmic struggles, the clash of the elements, and the battles in the sky between the vying winds. At moments such as these, Thomson’s verse becomes almost sublime, carried on the wings of robust, rolling adjectives and the epic afflatus of stentorian diction. Rapt apostrophes are addressed to a ‘Thou’ that is, at least in its graphic form, a positivist God described as a vital force of nature, a form of energy that 8

Among the fruits of autumn, Thomson mentions pears, apples, grapes, and the ‘luscious fig’, as Keats called this ‘intoxicating’, Romantic gift of nature.

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organizes the whole and leads it to an ideal state of perfection: ‘with such perfection framed / Is this complex stupendous scheme of things. / But, though concealed, to every purer eye / The informing Author in his works appears’. There are spectacles that evoke the principle of pure, chaste love: for example, the sight of chicks in a nest, fed by their parents until they are strong enough to take wing to freedom and independence. Nature is God revealed and present, and in the final hymn Thomson expresses much the same thoughts as Hopkins in his nature sonnets, echoed in the line: ‘Man marks not Thee, marks not the mighty hand’.9 The whole of creation raises its voice in praise of the Creator, and the final hymn exudes the same optimism we find at the end of Hopkins’s ‘Deutschland’ when he hails God as Lord of the blessed universe. ‘Spring’ rejects, in the end, the kind of love that leads to jealousy and madness, excess of passion and loss of control. In ‘Autumn’ the lines dedicated to the chaste peasant girl, Lavinia, might have been written by Wordsworth; this is yet another moral miniature that teaches how much easier it is for pure, unsullied love to grow and thrive in a state of nature.10 Spring deludes us that the Garden of Eden may be restored, and the poet notes the strident contrast between that golden age and the present ‘iron times’. In the city vice runs riot, and fops frequent those dens of sin that are the theatres of the Restoration period (only Steele and his ‘conscious lovers’ are saved from censure). The march of civilization corresponds to leaving the current chaos and working together to guarantee social justice and liberty in a climate of constructive activism. Thomson’s aim is fundamentally militant: after enthusing over the sights of nature, he proceeds to extol the great men and women of history, the reformers and restorers, patriots and true servants of the state. § 107. Thomson II: ‘The Castle of Indolence’. England aroused from sloth The two short compositions by Thomson that are still remembered, apart from the three longer poems, are the work of an ‘engaged’ poet, celebrative and emphatic, eager, when not actually reckless, feverishly shaking 9 10

Compare Hopkins’s sonnet, ‘God’s Grandeur’. Rossetti’s brother, in his edition of Thomson (quoted in § 106.3 n. 6), thought it was by Pope, such is the grace and elegance of the style.

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the slothful – ironically, he being semi-paralyzed – with delirious proclamations, appeals and battle hymns. Thomson always strikes when the iron is hot: ‘To the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton’ was written immediately after the death of the great physicist in 1727. Using various periphrases, he summarizes the wave theory and that of colours and of the comets. He hails him as the discoverer of the laws of nature, but, at the same time, as someone who is able to see in nature the hand of providence – therefore the patient discoverer of the system of nature. He observes, and penetrates to ‘the finished university of things’, and, having found it, prostrates himself and adores ‘that Power / Who fills, sustains, and actuates the whole’. Newton is a physicist, but also a prophet, a prompter, and an example for the lesser men by whom he is surrounded. He is one who can halt the decline of an entire world, and raise it up again. The ode, ‘Britannia’, was written on the spur of the moment, after numerous flagrant acts of sabotage by the Spanish against British traders. In order to incite his fellow Britons to action, Thomson resorts to the personification of the nation, who from the shores of England declaims her appeal, resounding with exclamations, sarcasm, and references to heroes of the past. She pronounces a diagnosis of a narcotized country in urgent need of re-awakening. 2. Liberty (1735–1736) was conceived and written during Thomson’s journey to Italy, where he saw the disastrous effects of tyranny.11 Too many copies were printed, and were left on the shelves. This led critics to disparage the work, and this negative appraisal has stuck. Johnson confessed he had begun reading it, but had not got very far. The poem presents a vision, or dream, in which the personification of Liberty speaks: she tells of her birth and growing up in ancient Greece and Rome, and the great benefits she brought to the quality of life, the political system, and the world of culture, until men’s dedication to virtue began to decline. There is a foreshadowing of the thesis that the safekeeping of liberty is now the duty of Britain and her ‘limited’ monarchy. The poet also exhorts her to persevere unswervingly, and adds an encomium of Frederick, Prince of Wales. The love and practice of liberty, according to Thomson, gave lymph to the great civilization of Greece. Then, in obedience to some inscrutable decree of fate,

11

On Addison’s ‘Letter from Italy’ as a precedent, cf. § 96.2.

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both Greece and Rome tumbled. Books four and five salute the return of Liberty in the Renaissance; it is, however, liberty reduced and restrained by the despotic governments of the Italian city-states. Liberty is forced, in the end, to migrate ever further north, until she reaches the cliffs of Dover, and England. Her diffusion and development in England is summarized in rapid historical sketches up to 1688. Thomson is always conscious that liberty must be defended tooth and nail, and that it is always in danger. 3. In The Castle of Indolence Thomson makes poetic capital out of his own otium at Richmond, and uses it, self-critically, to urge himself and his fellow men to be more aware and active, both privately and in public. He advocates a union of politics, economics and poetry. Forever the lover of allegory, Thomson eschews now Miltonic verse and argument, and undertakes a parodic operation of exquisite taste, a Spenserian tourney between the forces of good and evil. Humorously purged of all excess stylistic weight, the poem is more readable and likeable than The Seasons. In reality, the target of Thomson’s denunciation and political satire is only slightly masked, and is well founded. The castle of indolence is the refuge of those who are victims of the violence, greed, and unfairness of the world. So, while he salutes his acolytes, the magician of the castle describes, much in the manner of Swift, the dysfunctions of society, with the inevitable disgust at the corruption of the Court and the political class. However, the castle of indolence is not only an anticipation of the Garden of the Hesperides of Tennyson’s Lotus Eaters; it also represents the palace of art, again in Tennyson, which is detached from the world, inoperative, and solipsistic, with minute descriptions of tapestries featuring romantic subjects, and, all around, mellifluous music. The atmosphere is one of apparent liberty, so much so that it merges into anarchy; each guest does what he likes; there are no laws to restrain him. One of the more sinister and devilish amusements of the inmates of the castle is to observe, in a magic crystal ball, the hustle and bustle of the world they have left behind – flashing images of the poor citizens in satirical tones reminiscent of the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century imitators of Juvenal, Donne and Pope.12 Thomson takes 12

Stanza 51 is particularly audacious, and teems with pimps, pettifoggers, whores, arrant adulators, shifty shopkeepers and other urban scum; the following stanza features a pageant of poetasters and pedants.

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pleasure in sketching various guests of the castle in the style of Pope, that is, without actually naming them. The poet quite openly includes himself among the guests (stanza 68), and exaggerates his laziness. In the second part, the ‘Knight of arts and industry’ intervenes, in Spenserian fashion, and destroys the castle and its ‘Archimage’. In an atmosphere that recalls a fable, we find Salvaggio, a hardworking, ingenuous peasant who gets Dame Poverty pregnant, with the result that she gives birth to a kind of holy fool, or literal enfant sauvage, though Rousseau is yet to come. After a quick training course, in the company of a poet, Philomelus, the knight heads for the castle, where, using a magic wand, he shows the unconvinced guests the transformation of the enchanted garden into a rotting wasteland. At the same time the by now penitent guests are pardoned. § 108. Dyer Thomson had a small group of imitators and rivals, who were, however, overshadowed by him. Of these, the most important is John Dyer (1699– 1757). Son of a wealthy lawyer, destined, against his will, to the practical arts and the law, with no university education but excellent schooling, Dyer repudiated his law studies, frequented a painter’s studio in London, and became a kind of wandering bohemian artist. Few of his paintings have survived, and not much of his poetry either, consisting as it does of a slender book of little more than 100 pages, last reprinted in 1930.1 Dyer has many things in common with Thomson: like him, he came from the provinces, and like him belonged to a different ethnic group, the Welsh, whose country had been annexed to England long before Scotland, and where political and religious separatism was only just less explosive; and yet, the local traditions and the Welsh language were cultivated in peace. He is a second poet-landscape painter, and a more professional one than Thomson, since he did actually paint: Grongar Hill appeared in the same year, 1726, as Thomson’s ‘Winter’, shortly after, or, some critics maintain, before Thomson’s poem. They were, however, conceived and composed quite independently. Some short time after the publication of Grongar Hill, 1

His entire production, first edited by E. Thomas, London 1903, was subsequently included in Minor Poets of the Eighteenth Century, ed. H. I’A. Fausset, London 1930.

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Dyer became an Anglican clergyman, and in 1740, the rector of a peaceful country church. As I mentioned, Thomson, too, was intended for an ecclesiastical career, but changed his mind; Dyer chose that same career perhaps out of necessity; he may have needed a steady income. Much later came The Fleece (1757) – like The Seasons, in the bucolic Virgilian mould – a poem in four books on the life of shepherds, sheep-shearing, and the making and spinning of wool. In between, in 1740, is a poem that seems to be a literal copy of Thomson’s Liberty: The Ruins of Rome, the result of a journey Dyer himself had made to Italy between 1724 and 1726.2 In any case, if Thomson the layman is an authentic religious poet, as well as being vehemently patriotic, Dyer the priest shares only his fervent patriotism; as a poet he is melancholy, meditative and elegiac, and his constant refrain reminds us that all must pass and fade away. Both look to a conservative revival, Thomson in the form of a return to an agricultural society, and Dyer to the pastoral world and the cottage industry of spinning, which might have made life a little easier for the dispossessed and the poor.3 Only peripheral poets like Thomson and Dyer could have brought about the systematic infringement of literary correctness inherent in discarding the heroic couplet, replaced, in Dyer’s case, by octosyllabic couplets and blank verse. His Grongar Hill is in all the anthologies of eighteenth-century English poetry, but his other works have been completely forgotten. After Johnson’s cautious praise, the Romantics were more generous, mainly because they saw in Dyer an anticipation of their own works. Wordsworth dedicated to him a mediocre sonnet, ‘To the Poet, John Dyer’, in which he pronounced The Fleece his masterpiece, hailed him as the painter of Welsh landscape executed with ‘musical delight’, and closed on a sour note, saying that while others, though unworthy, are crowned with laurels, poor Dyer has been consigned to cold oblivion; his ‘modest lay’, however, says Wordsworth, will always be appreciated by those few readers with truly refined taste. The mockery 2 3

In Rome Dyer contracted malaria, but Praz (in the review cited in n. 3), does not give the source of the affirmation that Dyer hated Rome. The thesis expounded in the book by L. Goldstein, Ruins and Empire: The Evolution of a Theme in Augustan and Romantic Literature, Pittsburgh, PA 1977, reviewed in SSI, vol. II, 178–82.

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that greeted The Fleece on its publication was due, no doubt, to an aesthetic prejudice, according to which sheep-shearing is, by definition, ‘unpoetical’. 2. ‘A Country Walk’, which already reflects pulsating nature and the vibrant enthusiasm of various country tasks and pursuits, is earlier than Grongar Hill, of which a first Pindaric version, that is to say, in closed stanzas and irregular metre, had been drafted a few months earlier, and immediately re-written in a verse reminiscent of Milton’s ‘L’Allegro’. The cheerful presentation of the multi-coloured spectacle of nature gradually becomes sombre, because the phenomena of rising are always counteracted by a tendency to fall. Humanized nature, caught up in this ascending movement, crumbles and flakes; such is the destiny of lofty towers and ancient castles, suggesting a moral lesson for the observer. But the maxims nature offers on the transience of all things are uncomfortably close to facile sermonizing. The horizontal movement of rivers, too, symbolizes man’s journey towards death. So, nature is beautiful to look at because it makes us forget her secret message. The ideal is, therefore, the peace that depends on and derives from one thing: letting go, giving up. The Ruins of Rome is a small milestone in the newly born cult of ruins and ‘antiquarianism’. Dyer revives a literary topos that was already popular with Latin and medieval poets and came back into fashion in the Baroque period; Thomson, and, before him, Addison, had tried it. It is an imaginary journey through the memories of a glorious past that is now dead, at the end of which Dyer makes the same diagnosis as Thomson, that Rome fell because it gave in to luxury and moral laxness. The Fleece echoes and imitates English pastorals from Spenser onward, but in a manner that has by now become unrecognizable. It is the kind of eccentric poem that was written in England with unfailing regularity every fifty years, vaguely resembling in oddness Drayton’s Poly-Olbion. Formally, it describes the productive cycle of wool; the individual stages are presented with scrupulous technical precision, creating the kind of friction between res and verba that later generations of readers found, wrongly, irritating. Dyer’s aim is the same as Thomson’s: to extol, like a true patriot, the temperate climate of England, birthplace of so many great personalities. The poet enthuses at the sight of pulsating activity, and concludes that only in one’s daily labour is true joy to be found; only by hard work can freedom and justice be preserved. The poem waxes didactic

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on the various ways and means to keep the flock healthy,4 dispenses advice and admonishments, loses itself in 100 or so digressions and a spectacular display of encyclopaedic erudition, and is, in short, a synthesis of the universal history of wool. § 109. Young* The son of a bishop, and educated at Oxford, Edward Young (1683– 1765) made his authorial debut around 1713, when he was no longer very young, with various encomiums and poems of circumstance, among which one on the death of Queen Anne. He then welcomed, rather too promptly it was thought by many, the accession of George I. In the same year he published a poem in three books presenting a wildly fanciful version of the Last Judgement, and, in 1719, another with the explicit and eloquent title of The Force of Religion, on the execution of the unfortunate Jane Grey, a rival of Elizabeth to the English throne. Between 1719 and 1721 Young tried his hand at the theatre, with two tragedies that met with great success there and then (one of them, The Revenge, is a kind of rifacimento of Othello); a third play was staged posthumously. Seven satires, which probably had some influence on Pope, came out between 1725 and 1728 under the title of The Universal Passion. Night Thoughts in nine books (full title The Complaint, or Night Thoughts),1 his monumental masterpiece, appeared only in 1742. The interval of relative inactivity can be explained by the fact that Young, a Titan in temperament who had tried to astound readers with long, sensationalistic poems, diverted his ambition (indirectly acknowledged as a natural urge in man, and commented on at length in Night Thoughts) into

4

In ll. 287–91 of Book I he mentions Berkeley’s treatise on the beneficial properties of tar water (§ 100.3).

*

The Complete Works: Poetry and Prose, ed. J. Nichols, 2 vols, London 1854, repr. Hildesheim 1968; Night Thoughts, ed. S. Cornford, Cambridge 1989. I. St Bliss, Edward Young, Boston, MA 1969; H. Forster, Edward Young: The Poet of the ‘Night Thoughts’ 1683–1757, Alburgh 1986.

1

Young also wrote a paraphrase of the Book of Job.

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the fields of politics and religion. He had originally sought the patronage of a libertine nobleman, who promised him a seat in Parliament. This did not happen, so, at the age of forty, he decided to take Holy Orders. He was appointed chaplain to George II in 1728, but never managed to become a bishop. He had to be content with his position as rector of a provincial parish and a modest living. The external genesis of his main work and masterpiece was the inconsolable loss of three members of his family, one after the other, in close succession – his wife, Elizabeth, a descendant of Charles II; her daughter2 and her husband. In his work as a whole, Young not only marks the death of Augustanism and the birth of pre-Romanticism; he also contains the seeds of late nineteenth-century Baroque. 2. The preface to the ‘Odes to the Ocean’ (1728) announced the advent of a Longinian poetry characterized by ‘fire’ and ‘elevation’, the ‘abrupt’ and the ‘immethodical’. Night Thoughts, an outright rejection of the couplet and all closed forms, inaugurated the subgenre of nocturnal meditation in graveyards, which was to lead to the European phenomenon of ‘sepulchral poetry’. The new sensibility and aesthetics were theorized in ‘Conjectures on Original Composition’ (1759), a letter in prose addressed to the novelist, Richardson: by looking deep into himself, Young said, man discovers an alien genius, by which is meant the artist’s uncompromising originality, a concept similar to Hopkins’s highly idiosyncratic ‘taste of myself ’ (I shall be referring often to Hopkins in this presentation). The cult of genius is, for Young, more important than imitation of the classics; in terms of the famous querelle the moderns are superior to the ancients.3 Almost immediately the ‘Young phenomenon’ was caught up in a crossfire of critical demolition countered by exaltation; he was idolized, he was forgotten; he was a great poet, he was a pretentious poetaster. Some of his works were considered silly by his contemporaries, others ridiculous. Yet, Pope and Johnson wrote of them with respect, and Blake and the French painter, Vafflard, illustrated Night Thoughts. Outside England, the poem 2 3

The poet’s stepdaughter, as Young himself recalls, died in France, but burial had been denied her as she was a Protestant. This declaration of the ancients’ independence from tyranny had vast resonance in Germany where a ‘Young cult’ sprang up within the Storm and Stress movement.

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was translated almost at once into many languages, including Italian; with the title, Le Notti, it achieved enormous and lasting popularity.4 Writing at the end of the nineteenth century, and with no knowledge of Hopkins, little of Francis Thompson, and nothing of Patmore, Saintsbury maintained that in the past two generations, since about 1850, Young had slipped, not to say plunged out of fashion. His diagnosis was correct: already in 1857 George Eliot had written a long essay of stricture.5 Then, mysteriously, he became fashionable with the poets of the First World War, such as Blunden, after which he returned to oblivion, rescued only in 1962, in a series of lectures by Robert Birley with the eloquent title of Sunk without Trace.6 His opera omnia is still available only in libraries, in old eighteenth- or nineteenthcentury editions, though Night Thoughts has recently been re-edited and re-published, and critics have begun to show a new interest in him. 3. Wherein lie the fascination and repulsion aroused by this work? First of all, in the rejection of Augustan restraint and understatement, replaced by magniloquence and stylistic excess: secondly, in the self-confident use of the first-person narrator, without the risk of being accused of megalomania or theatricality. The poem is divided into nine books, published in instalments between 1742 and 1745, for a total of 10,000 lines. Together with Thomson’s The Seasons and Cowper’s The Task, it ranks as a monument to the eighteenth century. His contemporaries doubted his sincerity when he released such a torrential flow of sorrow for the deaths of his dear ones.7 The frigid self-control we find in, for example, Pope, is swept 4

5

6 7

Cf. A. Zanco, Storia della letteratura inglese, Torino 1958, vol. II, 183 n. 4, for an approximate bibliography of Young’s reception in Italy, from the excessive enthusiasm of Baretti (who placed him above Petrarch and Berni), Metastasio and Cesarotti, to the veiled criticisms of Monti, Bettinelli, Parini and, especially, Leopardi. All the Italian Romantics, including Foscolo and Pindemonte, were influenced by him. Volume 5, § 185.4. Young George Eliot, ‘esoteric’ and with ambitions of becoming a Romantic poet, knew several passages from Young by heart. Her essay is proof – for Eliot herself – of the death of the solipsistic poet and the birth of the prose-writer who aspires to reform society. R. Birley, Sunk without Trace, London 1962. It was rumoured that Young was already courting a rich heiress only a few months after the death of his wife.

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away by the waves of pathos; metapoetic Young often apologizes for his outpourings of passion: he cannot help them, so carried away is he by his faith. The first half, more lyrical, reads better than the second, but all the same, long expanses of verbosity, of pure philosophy or pseudo philosophy, or sermons in verse, alternate with spectacular, incandescent, corybantic images, so that the reader feels he is in the presence of poetry that is above the ordinary. Indeed, certain passages recall, in the sublimity of their language and the magnificence of the inspiration, the great purple passages of Shakespeare or Marlowe. In such cases it is all too easy to pick out the occasional lapse in taste, or cases of downright bathos. The weakness of the poem lies in the dialectical framework. Critics have so far been unable to identify the ‘Lorenzo’ addressed throughout the poem by the first-person poetic narrator. It is, and remains, just an awkward attempt to converse with an interlocutor; the name chosen certainly refers to someone we do not know:8 the nobleman, Philip Warton, referred to earlier? The poet’s own dissolute son? A fictitious portrait of a libertine atheist, sceptic or deist? He is above all a kind of alter ego of the poet, a young disciple with whom to engage in an endless battle of wills. It should be remembered that Young, when young, was anything but pure and proper. 4. The basic premise of the poem can be summarized quite briefly: the rejection of earthly things, and death as the ultimate consolation of man, not the end but the gateway to a new, immortal life – as proved by the exploration of nature and the human heart. Conceptually and formally, Night Thoughts runs through the history of English poetry and launches into the future the model of a rich, introspective, persuasive poem. Long, meticulous and monotonous, in the form of a wise man’s words of advice to his young pupil – hence the wealth of maxims and argumentation typical of the sermon – it is not a narrative poem of romance and fantasy like Spenser’s, or a biblical epic like Milton’s. To find something similar, one 8

Dr Johnson ( JLI, vol. II, 397) does not exclude the possibility that after graduating Young may have been a tutor, and recalls the gossip, unfounded but somehow plausible, that Young was the model for Fielding’s Parson Adams. Nine tenths of Johnson’s ‘Life of Young’ were, in fact, as he himself confesses, written by Herbert Croft.

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would have to go back to Gower. But was not the skull, and the bones of the human skeleton, and the tomb that housed them, were these not cardinal points of Metaphysical-Baroque meditation and preaching? ‘Our birth is nothing but our death begun’, says Young, and in saying this seems to paraphrase Death’s Duel or one of Donne’s Holy Sonnets. The ‘philosophy of tears’ is a particularly inspired passage of the fifth book, which, in its variations, brings to mind Crashaw’s ‘The Weeper’. Young was a poet ‘in love with death’, who describes the delights of a life spent in this condition. The first poet to show concrete signs of Young’s influence is Browning, who wrote complicated dramatic monologues on theological subjects, especially as an old man, which are as long and repetitive as Night Thoughts. Reading Young, in fact, one cannot but think that his poem was an unofficial primer for Browning, bearing in mind that Young was still a talking point in the 1830s, when Browning was debuting. There are many traits in common between Night Thoughts and the first sprawling poems by Browning, on the same metaphysical and theological issues, like Pauline or Sordello. After Browning, Young resurfaces in the works of the Spasmodics and their school – in the gigantic dimensions, the fierce, apocalyptic afflatus, and the aim to shock by means of magniloquence – and in neo-Baroque poets like Patmore,9 Hopkins and Thompson. Of course, it is always dangerous to posit and argue, on the basis of vague conceptual similarities or even blatant lexical echoes, the influence of any given poet in the absence of documentary evidence of frequentation; and the religious vocabulary of devotional poetry is limited and repetitive. The parallels between Young and Hopkins, though, are interesting: both studied at Oxford, both were frustrated clergymen (however, Hopkins never aspired to a bishopric, and abhorred a lengthy poem). Hopkins’s later poetry, especially in the dramatic genre, rests on the same foundations as Young’s, and displays the same amazing wordplay and conceptual transfers, real oxymora that are rationally incomprehensible and inadmissible, which Young stretches out over thousands of lines of poetry, and Hopkins compresses into a mere fourteen. Hopkins himself was a dramatic, ‘terrible’ poet, at home in the

9

Both wrote elegies for their dead wives.

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dark and near to graves, and sepulchral, as well, as seen in the sonnet ‘I wake and feel the fell of dark’. But it is the sonnet on the Heraclitean fire that compresses Young’s fixed theological idea that man is both nothing and everything, human and divine – and, with a play on words that strikes home, ‘a mortal, and immortal man’.10 In both cases the rhetoric is that of ‘pathos’ rather than ‘ethos’. Young writes, like Hopkins, in the form of mimesis, hotfoot on the intense emotion behind the poem. This is borne out by the various artifices, the traits or ‘tricks’ both are accused of indulging in – parentheses, asides, interjections that mimic the subject’s agitation and his inner torment, suspensions, aposiopeses, anacolutha, fractured syntax that gives an almost sobbing effect, crescendos of exclamations or rhetorical questions, superabundance of alliteration, and metaphors many a time obscure or fanciful.11 Or the frequent anaphoric prayers that, as at the end of the ‘Deutschland’, are practically symphonic phrases, sounding out suddenly at various points in the poem; an example of what I mean can be seen in the passage on immortality achieved by mortal man through Christ. 5. There is not just Lorenzo: in a bizarre mix of reality and mythology, Young renames Elizabeth, his wife, as Lucia; his stepdaughter as Narcissa; and her husband as Philander. The narrator is imagined standing by their graves, moved but not convinced by the flow of rhetoric coming from the orator-confessor. George Eliot noted disapprovingly that they are not real people but transfigurations. Each of the nine books has a title that refers to one of the universal philosophical-theological inquiries:12 life, death and immortality; time, death and friendship; the triumph of Christianity, followed by the ‘relapse’. Divided in turn into two blocks of five and four books, the second part is entitled ‘The Infidel Reclaimed’, in other words, led back like a stray sheep to the fold. Proof of man’s immortality lies first 10 11

12

Echoed in Hopkins’s definition of man as an ‘immortal diamond’. Cf. the one of the old man with grey hair but young thoughts, or that of a broken clock whose chimes are belied by the hands; or the one, reminiscent of Crashaw in its candour, of the stars as bunches of grapes hanging from a great vine, watered by the nectar of eternal life. His familiarity with Scholasticism, jokingly encouraged by Pope, is mentioned by Johnson ( JLI, vol. II, 412).

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of all in the constant renewal of nature, and then in man himself, in whom feelings and reason engage in an incessant dance or duel. The very progress of the seasons would be meaningless if man too did not rise again; if he too were not immortal. Young acknowledges feelings and emotions and does not condemn them, unless they are conducive to evil actions. His argument becomes defensive: ‘Who wishes life immortal, proves it too’. Since this is a scrupulous examination of man’s make-up, it is also an answer to Pope and his Essay on Man. There is, therefore, a change of register compared with the lyricism of the first part; the tone, and end, are apologetic. Echoing Shaftesbury, Young weaves an apology of ‘pleasure reconciled with virtue’. Wisdom is equilibrium between unbridled joy and unremitting sorrow. After several thousand, frankly boring, lines, the poem picks up pace again with the Last Judgement, and the hymn to night, night which has inspired the poet to declaim God’s greatness, or, in Hopkins’s words, ‘God’s grandeur’. § 110. Minor anti-Popian poets With the death of Pope, and even before, a spontaneous school or movement of anti-Augustan poets took shape. They were against Pope and the aesthetics of rules, and enemies of reason, seen as barren and lifeless, and in favour of the natural flow of imagination. The beacon, guide and reference point are no longer identifiable in Pope; while waiting for an authoritative contemporary to take his place, authors looked, in particular, to Spenser, and, to a lesser degree, to Milton – not the author of Paradise Lost, but the Milton of ‘L’Allegro and ‘Il Penseroso’. This meant that the heroic couplet, too, was considered no longer suited to the ‘new needs’. At the same time, London ceased to be the centre of literary recruitment, and the figure of the court poet declined, as did that of the poet as court official, chaplain or ecclesiastic. Some of these minor poets came from the far north or from the south, so small poetic epicentres or verse cradles sprang up here and there. The poet became a part-time practitioner of his craft, while carrying on his profession as a doctor, farmer or customs official. Poetry interrogates itself as to its identity – where it comes from, and what are its aims, and whether feeling or reason drives its chariot. Some proclaimed boldly that poetry is purely enthusiasm, sensation, emotion, and that its setting is rural and not urban. Literary theory is updated. Poems

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in unusual forms are written on completely new topics: first wool, now spleen. The whims of ordinary folk are rummaged through, and their idiosyncrasies noted, and all the strange oddities of life far away from the hub. 2. Mark Akenside (1721–1770), the son of a Newcastle butcher, and born, for his good fortune, near a printing shop, began his literary career at the age of sixteen with what was an attack on a cowardly Walpole and a call for the resumption of hostilities against Spain. He was able to attend the University of Edinburgh thanks to a scholarship from the Nonconformist community intended for future ministers of the church, which Akenside never became. In fact, he abandoned theology for medicine, and after giving back the scholarship, took his medical degree in Leiden in the same year, 1744, that saw the publication of his philosophical poem in three books, The Pleasures of Imagination,1 which he later revised and expanded into four books (the general opinion is that he ruined the original, although, under a different title, the revised version contains many lyrical passages on childhood that cannot but remind the reader of Wordsworth). To give an idea: the subject chosen is the working of the mind in its daily tasks and in artistic creation. Behind this lies Locke’s epistemology: Akenside effectively assigns a key role to the imagination, which stores information from the outside world. Art is an almost physiological reproductive process; matter and thought couple and create, and at the end of the gestation period, the work of art is born. It is no coincidence that Akenside’s M. D. thesis was on the growth of the foetus. This is not an ‘essay’ on man or on criticism in the manner of Pope, but on the psychology of art and poetry. At the same time, sense matter is divided into three categories: the beautiful, the new, and the sublime. The latter comprehends subconscious terror. Akenside, however, gets out of this rigorously heuristic position by taking refuge in the most retrograde and simplistic theology when he affirms that, after all, the created world is God’s work of art. The reader of Keats may be surprised by Akenside’s insistence on the connection between Beauty and Truth. A busy doctor, he found time to write poems that were anything but pure theoretical speculation (like calls to action, some of them frankly 1

The title was obviously taken from the collection of Addison’s Spectator articles on the same topic. It was surprisingly translated into Italian in 1764.

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equivalent to war-mongering, addressed to the over-mild, quietist opponent of Walpole) and coolly switched to the couplet after opting for blank verse. Two books of more enjoyable odes on ‘various subjects’ appeared in 1745. The following year, Akenside took on the editorship of a respectable newspaper, The Museum, in which he published editorials on a wide range of subjects, as well as poems by Collins and the Wartons. In the meantime, he was on the road to becoming perhaps the greatest doctor-poet in English (followed later by Robert Bridges). He contributed to a poetic anthology edited by Dodsley in 1758 with several examples of the new epigrammatic form of ‘inscriptions’. Right up to his death he busied himself in revising his Pleasures. Slated by Johnson, who allowed him, however, a flowing blank verse and considerable prosodic skill, undermined by a regrettable conceptual dispersion, he was lovingly guyed for his Pindaric pretensions in Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle. His vast mythological erudition, expressed in calligraphic variations and smooth Apollonian enumerations, in the end too long and monotonous, made him dear to the Victorians, who reprinted his works several times, and believed that his genius would have produced other, more tangible fruits had he not died so young.2 His ‘Hymn to the Naiads’, often quoted by critics and admirers, is in reality nothing but a long, boring list of names. The basic contradiction is that Akenside as a poet is didactic and lyrical at the same time, with the friction produced by a Romantic signifier applied to an Illuminist signified. As a scientist, he has to reconcile deductive, objective reason with subjective feeling. Often, if not always, he praises science, going so far as to dedicate an ode celebrating what is usually considered to be the epistemological adversary of poetry. He addresses science as a devout disciple, and sings of its discipline with the fervour of one devoted to fancy, in verses that foreshadow the emotional outpourings of Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley. Akenside’s god is reason, and to reason he bows at the end of his pilgrimage: imagination must be guided by reason, expressly called ‘the judge’. The poet exhorts himself to dominate the fire of his passions once he has discovered and identified them: ‘Still true to Reason be my plan.’ 2

Today Akenside is being revalued, albeit timidly, as may be seen by the excellent edition of his Poetical Works by R. Dix, Madison, WI and London 1996.

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3. The Scottish poet, Robert Blair (1699–1746) was a ‘one-book man’. Like Young, he was a minister of the Anglican Church, and his The Grave may be seen as an appendix of Night Thoughts in subject, intention and metre. But it is not an echo: the poem was published in 1743, but conceived and written in 1731, before he was ordained.3 Blair did not repudiate it afterwards, since, in his view, it was not in contrast with his calling. The aim of the poem is similar to Young’s; to console and lead souls to a life of Christian virtue, with the help of visions of death and decomposition, and, of course, the final reckoning. Blair was highly educated and eclectic (he was deeply interested in optics and botany) but far less agitated than Young. His poem – a truly slender volume that can be read at one sitting – is varied in pace, metre and dimensions: it is as intense as Night Thoughts is verbose, long-winded, and turbid: a series of sketches, pictures, photographs and daguerreotypes. In contemporary and nineteenth-century editions, these episodes, detached and titled, were illustrated by drawings, rather like the emblems of Quarles; and, in fact, the final admonishments in each section end with the usual adages of the preacher on the vanity of all earthly things. Blair’s blank verse, too, is quite unlike Young’s: not ostentatious, fractured and high-sounding, but intimate, quiet, and meditative. 4. Matthew Green (1696–1777) is a contradiction in terms: a freethinking Quaker. He is the first of two minor humorists specializing in light verse and belonging to the ‘playful’ category so dear to the English mentality. Born in London, he was a larger than life customs officer, and author of The Spleen (1737), a poem in octosyllabic couplets on melancholy and its cure, full of wit, lively colloquialisms, colourful neologisms and amusing personifications. So, Green is the exact opposite of Young and Blair, and the new-born ‘school of night’: he is the poet of sunshine, and mocks, or is philistinely indifferent to, its morbid existentialist questioning (‘Hence I no anxious thoughts bestow / On matters I can never know’). He is not enticed by the metaphysical, the horrific, or the apocalyptic; he does hand out precepts, but with a view to a quiet life, pleasures, the countryside, good cheer and the ‘serenity’ of Epicurus, who thought pain

3

On the highly probable independence of the two poems, see CHI, vol. X, 147 n. 1.

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was hell, and melancholy purgatory. The poem’s epilogue seems intended to criticize the ‘enthusiasm’ that Joseph Warton was, at that very moment, exalting. Another advocate of the simple country life, only slightly embellished by mythology, is William Shenstone (1714–1763), a Shropshire squire who dedicated a fortune and a great deal of time to ‘improving’ his country estate of Leasowes, near Birmingham.4 He wrote quite a large book of verses, in a variety of moods and genres – elegies, odes, eclogues, epigrams, ‘inscriptions’, levities (more or less like nugae, trifles) and humorous sketches, several of which have become famous in the course of time. One of them is ‘The Schoolmistress’5 in thirty-five stanzas in imitation of Spenser (the second time after Thomson). The choice of metre and the veneer of archaism are the perfect vehicle for a good-hearted story that is rich in pathos, yet not without a note of parody in its treatment of the subject, which is the routine of village life. It seems like an anticipation of Goldsmith, or Crabbe, or the scenes of provincial life that will fill page on page in the middle of the nineteenth century – the various sagas of Middlemarch, Barchester and Carlingford, which, like Shenstone, will leave in the reader a pleasant memory and little else. For his contemporaries, Shenstone was an arbiter of taste, and yet Johnson denied he had any particular poetic discernment at all, even though he had suggested the Reliques to Bishop Percy, and in that case his judgement has never been questioned. He had no great intelligence, so cannot be considered a poet of the first order, with the exception of the occasional ode and a few ballads.6 5. The brothers Joseph Warton (1722–1800) and Thomas Warton (1728–1790), sons of a celebrated Oxford philologist, took a more obvious stance – though still, all in all, rather confused – against the dominance of Pope. This was because they were not only active poets, but also,

4 5 6

According to the criteria of the ‘English garden’ inspired by the paintings of Lorrain and Poussin, with streams, lakes and classical temples. She taught Shenstone as a child; her many eccentricities, typical perhaps of an ‘old maid’ (among them, an inflexible dislike of Papists), are lovingly described in stanza after stanza. Johnson and many others spare ‘A Pastoral Ballad’, a shepherd’s lament for his unrequited love.

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and especially, critics and historians of poetry; thus they are, practically, the first outstanding modern literary critics. They were largely responsible for the revival of interest, indeed passionate interest, in the muchmaligned Middle Ages, an ideological cornerstone for Romanticism, and in Gothic architecture. This might be seen as a reason for moving them to a different section in this book, and dealing them together with Gray and Collins. Of the two, Joseph, who became a parish rector, and headmaster of Winchester, wrote a fundamental study of Pope in two parts, published in 1756 and 1782, in which he accentuated the difference between an intelligent, witty man, and a real, authentic poet, exemplifying his thesis with references to the great English poets from Donne onwards. These essays inaugurated the method and praxis of judgement that were to dominate the nineteenth century in the figure of Matthew Arnold: the method was based on apodictic, a priori, abstract criteria applied to individual authors and texts. The results were not always convincing, and sometimes plainly wrong. For Warton, Donne and Swift were just clever; Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton represented the pathetic and the sublime at the highest level. Warton, in fact, divided poets into four categories in descending order, the last of which were mere versifiers. In his analysis of Pope, Warton places him at the top of the second category, which numbers those who possess poetic genius, but to a moderate degree; in short, they are only correct, elegant and generally useful. These ideas were applied principally in The Enthusiast, or the Lover of Nature, where the superiority of nature over culture is taken for granted, and projects aimed at improving the landscape, like those of Shenstone on his estate, or in France, in the gardens of Versailles, are viewed with suspicion. Even the works of Titian and Raphael were inferior to the ‘rich colours’ of nature, a pure emanation of spiritual and moral influence, liberally dispensed to men. Wordsworth is not far in the future. The diction is radically new: gone is the ‘cold correctness’ of Addison and Pope; the modern style is passionate, inspired and enrapturing.7 In 1754, Thomas Warton, who, when not teaching poetry, dedicated 7

The prodigious afflatus of the ode cannot mask its debt to neoclassical poetic diction in the form of pairs of nouns plus some worn-out adjective, or a great number of compound nouns, or a certain verbosity.

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his time to drinking, smoking, and keeping bad company, thus creating quite a fashion, published a set of observations on the Faerie Queene that match those of his brother on Pope, and accentuate the need to contextualize the masterpieces of the past by recreating – an anticipation of the theories of Wolfgang Iser – the ‘horizon’ of reception of the historical reader and identifying with him. The year 1774 marks the beginning of the publication of the very first, monumental history of English poetry (from the twelfth to the sixteenth century); the second and third volumes came out in 1778 and 1781. The history was left unfinished. This otherwise admirable work is compromised by a number of prejudices that were seized upon and criticized by Romantic critics: for example, the contention that Elizabethan literature was glorious and golden because it was near in time to the Gothic, but also close to the equilibrium and order of modernity.8 Most of the poems of Thomas Warton, Poet Laureate from 1785 until his death in 1790, were written before he was twenty-three, and include an example of the ‘graveyard’ poetry, The Pleasures of Melancholy; a later group of sonnets injected new life into an unfashionable genre. The verses on Joshua Reynolds, which marked an unfortunate return to neoclassicism and the predominance of art over nature, constitute a palinode that confirms the amateur, impressionistic nature of Warton’s critical theory, not unlike other literary theorists operating in a period of transition.

8

DAI, vol. II, 669–70.

Part IV 

The Eighteenth Century Comes of Age

§ 111. Britain from 1745 to 1789 The significance of the first of these two dates has already been explained; the second obviously refers to the French Revolution, and has been chosen because that Revolution changed the course of learning and the arts in the whole of Europe, including Britain. The period of just more than forty years that I will examine here is characterized at home by rapid structural transformations, helped and stimulated by numerous inventions, resulting in a surge in industrial and agricultural production. New social needs are met by political reforms often blocked by resistance from conservative forces. In foreign affairs, which have great repercussions on the domestic situation, the scenario once again is one of a series of wars in various parts of the globe, and, as a consequence, some heroic deeds, more inglorious actions, and a few outright debacles. The period ends with a wave of national panic caused by the spread of revolutionary ideals; in Britain and the empire, revolution does not actually break out: there are, instead, uprisings against intolerance and economic disparity. These are put down by force of arms. 2. The beginning of the Industrial Revolution is conventionally set in 1760. Thanks to about twelve inventions, of which the best known is the jenny, Britain becomes the leading producer of cast iron, which, in turn, leads to a frenzy of production, mostly by John Wilkinson. Iron takes the place of stone in architecture. An enhanced network of canals crossed by bridges facilitates the exchange of goods, cuts transport time and therefore costs, increases supply and favours consumer activity. Along with waterway traffic, regular coach services are introduced. The craft industry collapses, and agriculture is saved by the extension of enclosures. New agricultural technology changes the way people eat. The consequences are a rise in agricultural unemployment, the reduction to a form of slavery of the factory workers, and an increase in child labour, as denounced by Blake and all progressive radicals. The ‘appalling’ picture of England at the beginning of the eighteenth century has been swept away; English towns are clean and hygienic1 thanks to the diligence of the local administrations. While the

1

See the exception mentioned in PLU, 87.

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aristocracy apes its French cousins in an attempt to conjure up an amateurish ancien régime, the masses, with no spiritual guide to lead them, are taken in hand by the indefatigable Wesley. At the same time, cries for parliamentary reform are backed by the Rational Dissenters, and the enlightened Burke. In 1785, Pitt presents a reform bill, which is rejected by Parliament. The social blight of madness has, in two or three poets (Chatterton, Cowper and partly Blake) a religious origin; asylums are created where madmen are interned, while religion continues to cause manic-depressive disease. 3. From an institutional point of view, this is the age of George III and Pitt the Elder. The king was twenty-two years of age when he came to the throne in 1760. He was, not the son, but the grandson of George II, and reigned at first under the guidance of the Prime Minister, Lord Bute, a Scot, and therefore hated and derided, as his fellow-countrymen often were at the time. George appeared to his subjects to be a responsible monarch, dedicated to his duties, and untrammelled by mistresses. However, some feared that he meant to revive the royal prerogative and introduce a more authoritarian administration. His sixty-year reign was to be remembered for the loss of the American colonies and the contestations launched at the government by the radical, Wilkes, from the pages of the North Briton and from the opposition benches of the House of Commons. Walpole had been replaced by Pitt the Elder because what was seen as cowardly pacifism was no longer appreciated by the people, who felt that Britain had bowed to Spain and France and surrendered her influence on the Continent as well as her command of the seas. The year 1770 marks the birth of jingoism and a new race of military heroes, immortalized by despatches and war bulletins, as Byron later remarked in his Don Juan. Prussia took the place of Austria as the main ally of the British crown. Austria responded by joining forces with France. Pitt the Elder, grandson of ‘Diamond’ Pitt (who had risen from trade to become governor of Madras), is often compared with Melville’s Captain Ahab, obsessed as he was with his metaphysical combat against France, guilty of clouding the prestige and obstructing the commercial power of Britain. He died in 1778 after his celebrated address before the House of Lords. His speeches have been printed (but in the form of unofficial transcription, since it was against the law to publish parliamentary proceedings), and they justify parallels with Demosthenes

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and Cicero for the elegance, concision and classical clarity of the style. In the latter part of the eighteenth century, commercial power was centred on the monopoly of fishing, furs, and naval supplies in the seas of North America. Quebec was conquered in 1759, Montreal surrendered in 1760, and, with the Treaty of Paris in 1763, France gave up her Canadian territories, with the exception of the smaller islands. The British shrewdly conceded liberty of language and religion to the French-Canadians, and in 1774 approved the enactment of French law, and guaranteed the presence of French-speaking representatives in the legislative council. This diplomatic success led to a huge increase in GDP at home. Almost immediately, the American colonists took up arms to fight against taxation levied, in their eyes, to pay for the Seven Years’ War. When the Treaty of Versailles was signed in 1783, no-one foresaw the creation of a single nation, from ocean to ocean, also because Spain and France still had control over vast parts of the continent, thus breaking up the area of British influence. 4. Meanwhile, in Ireland, Britain faced the following problems: pressing demands for religious freedom, complaints against absent landlords, a peasant population that was frustrated and dispirited, and a languishing economy. Irish resistance flourished because Britain was occupied on other fronts – in America and India. Wolfe Tone secured the support of the French, sending ripples of fear through the Prostestant population, and in 1798 led a rebellion that was crushed with great loss of blood. A timid law against the discrimination of Catholics led to riots in London in 1780 headed by, it is believed, Lord George Gordon, an eccentric Scot (the ‘Gordon Riots’ form the background to Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge), at the end of which, 458 casualites were left on the ground, and much damage had been caused by acts of vandalism. The radicals were accused of fomenting and supporting the rebellion. In India, beginning in 1750, Britain had vied with France for control over various regions; the contest was brought to an end by the victories of the legendary Clive. India at once became the Eldorado of a military, and, especially, bureaucratic class eager to to make easy money with very little sweat – indeed, in a restrained, civilized, English way. Warren Hastings, the Governor General of India, was tried for extortion in an unprecedented law case. But his aim was to consolidate the British Empire, mainly by offering protection to various Indian princes in return

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for peace in the local environment. Faced by ever-increasing demands for money from the government, the East India Company began selling opium to China in exchange for silver. By the end of the eighteenth century, the golden age of relations between the colonizers and the colonized had come to an end: separatism peeped out over the parapet. § 112. The eighteenth century comes of age From the middle of the century, the world of literature and culture had been the scene of contradictory, not to say chaotic phenomena. From a certain point of view, the second half of the century might be called ‘the triumph of Enlightenment’, as it has indeed often been defined. From another angle, it might be seen as the collapse of that very Enlightenment. Unwilling to commit themselves, some literary historians name the subperiod 1740–1770 ‘the survival of classicism’. That after 1745 oppositions once clear become less so is an observation that might well be applied to the Renaissance at its height, and in these volumes I myself have pointed out that late Renaissance, Baroque and Mannerism are not distinctly different, but overlapping trends. The typologist, Yuri Lotman, postulates a clean break between the Middle Ages and the three successive cultural models; but he does not take into account theorists like Walter Pater or E. R. Curtius and their counterproposal of a chromatic, rather than diachronic evolution of Weltanschauungen: the former speaks of a ‘Renaissance within the limits of the middle age itself ’, using an audacious oxymoron; the latter shifts the caesura to the end of the eighteenth century with the Industrial Revolution. It is quite obvious that no such break takes place in a year or even a decade, but one may agree – for example, with historian Paul Hazard – that in England, as elsewhere, the year 1660 marks the beginning of gradual change leading to a process that comes to completion with the end of the eighteenth century. Slight changes in sensibility may be posthumous or anticipatory, and the connections between the various pieces of the epistemological mosaic call for non-univocal solutions. In other words, in the second half of the eighteenth century, the previously unchallenged sway of reason is now contested and rivalled by feelings, passions and the imagination. Already before 1745, Vico insisted on the importance of folk culture, and the primacy of reason was contested by irrationalists, mystics,

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spiritualists like Wesley and Swedenborg, and a whole host of theosophists, magicians, alchemists and occultists of the likes of Mesmer and Cagliostro. 2. Philosophers like Hume and economists like Smith legitimize trade, and point to it as a important force in the development of the liberal arts, thus acknowledging, in part, the theories of Mandeville. The model of a nation founded on agriculture was no longer valid, but change was opposed by the so-called ‘country party’, which represented retrograde instances. Rousseau’s utopian social treatise was translated into English only in 1789, when it had already been savaged by Hume, followed by a number of imitators, including Bentham. Paine is a republican, and supports the independence of the American colonies. In the 1770s Hume leads the campaign in favour of electoral reform, which will come about much later, in 1832. After 1750 the rationalism and intellectualism of Locke is subjected to increasing criticism, and, in the field of ethics, the role of the imagination is highlighted. It all starts with the word ‘sympathy’, which is used to indicate a faculty that is superior to and other than the moral sense. Knowledge as such does not allow us to understand or share another person’s sorrow or pain; but such participation is necessary. Pure sensoriality is discussed. The intransigent rationalism of the deists is countered by an insistence on intimacy, starting with Rousseau’s Émile in 1762. The Genevan philosopher acknowledged the importance of reason, but added that the principles of justice and virtue are inborn in us: this, he says, is what we call ‘conscience’. This is quite a novelty; almost a complete inversion of tendencies. Meanwhile, free-thinking natural philosophy culminated in 1782 with the work of Joseph Priestley; William Godwin heard him preaching once, and became an atheist. Hume distances himself from orthodoxy and mocks it as superstition, but, at the same time, he clashes with free-thinkers when he says that religion derives from passion and imagination, fear and desire, and is, therefore, a kind of opium for the people. We have already seen the retort of, for example, Law, and the affirmation of sentiment. Wesley himself stopped studying mathematics because, he said, it led to atheism. Right to the very end, the eighteenth century continued to be, in its way, religious, or at least traversed by religious debate. Hume is sceptical about everything: it is impossible to define beauty or the source of impressions; in fact, whatever is useful is beautiful. The focus shifts from the object

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to the subject; the psychology of aesthetic perception is studied, and no explanation is found for the strange fact that something may be pleasing to one person and not to another. Reynolds’s aesthetics appears to furnish a suitable answer: he denies that genius, beauty and taste are inexplicable and defines them by reference to a uniform set of criteria. For him, the artist distils, from the diversity of perceived phenomena, a Platonically ideal image, otherwise known as the species, rather than the single individual.1 3. That there was a certain affinity between Joshua Reynolds and Dr Johnson is proved by the following: the five portraits made of the ‘great Cham’; Reynolds’s suggestion that Johnson form the Club; two dialogues Reynolds wrote in the style of Johnson; the manifestations of admiration and respect Reynolds received from members of Johnson’s entourage. Of great importance is the fact that Reynolds, who is only marginally a ‘poetpainter’, was, like Johnson, a critic of the arts, who laid down rules and norms as to the praxis of the work of art for the benefit of his students, while at the same time acting as an author-painter, thus generating at least some of the contradictions and incongruencies we shall find in Johnson. Reynolds’s Discourses, delivered between 1769 and 1790 at the Royal Academy, of which he was president, are, in one sense, a kind of ‘Lives of the most excellent painters’ in the style of Vasari, and, in another, a ‘pictorial’ version of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. Reynolds makes no reference to English painters of the past simply because there are none; but the penultimate ‘discourse’ is an in-depth study of Gainsborough. Johnson was as caustic as Reynolds was placid, prudent, likeable and diplomatic. His aesthetics is summed up in his invitation to pursue the ‘grand style’, synonymous with balance, elegance, but above all, energy and force, and the opposite of everything undisciplined, intemperate and affected. The following points will give some idea of Reynolds’s pictorial classifications: he defines Veronese as ‘luxuriant’ and Tintoretto as ‘capricious’; Michelangelo is, for him, the greatest painter of the ‘old school’; it is his belief that painting should imitate nature but hide, or improve, its most unseemly aspects. With reference to the Discourses, 1

One exception is the painter, Wright of Derby, who is open to the new industrial scenery and scientific frame of mind: one of his famous paintings represents an astronomy lesson featuring a planetarium.

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English critics have given a tendentious and arbitrary interpretation of a theory that is, in itself, quite arbitrary. Taken all together, they constitute an example of deconstruction in action. Successive English art historians – late nineteenth and twentieth-century – applied to Reynolds a number of ‘Ruskinian’ parameters, which did actually exist in Reynolds, albeit surreptitiously. Ruskin, too, had struggled to reconcile two urges: one was the delight in sensuous or sensual colour, which, his reason or instinct told him, was sinful and deplorable. The same applies to Reynolds, or, at least, it can be made out in his ideas on pictorial aesthetics. Reynolds himself thought that colour should be subject to form; he repeatedly affirmed that colour is a decorative element added to a form or drawing, and that it was those dangerous maestri, the Venetians, Titian and Tintoretto, who led European painting into the degeneration of the supremacy of colour. However, once he took off his professorial gown and picked up his paint brushes, he did exactly the opposite of what he preached. As a young man in Venice he had admired the masterpieces of Venetian colourism, and, in Rome, had been less struck by Michelangelo. Almost like Goya or Van Gogh after him, he had been obsessed by the search for the secret formula of Venetian colours. Twentieth-century art historians explained these contradictions by means of a debatable, indeed mistaken genetic theory, according to which the whole of northern European painting was Gothic, and therefore based entirely on form; ‘Gothic’ in art usually refers to architecture or sculpture, seldom to painting; so, the emphasis is on the ‘line’, in black and white, unchromatic. An equally dubious theory is that the predominance of colour over form was a side-effect of the diffusion of oriental art and culture at the beginning of the Renaissance, which merged with what were, in Gothic terms, ‘sensuous qualities’: Reynolds alludes to this in his seventh Discourse. This was the beginning of bold pictorial chiaroscuro, which blurs the outlines of the drawing, obfuscating the dividing line between one thing and another, and suggesting, on a symbolic or allegorical level, that good and evil, bad and good, are not so far apart, but are, instead, often uncomfortably close bedfellows. In short, colour tended to conceal the clear-cut shape. Hence Reynolds’s insistence on the need to distinguish between ‘pure colour’ – in Barthes’s terms, a signifier – and functional, that is, emotive, colour, of which, however he disapproved – theoretically at least. Critics after

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Reynolds agreed, in advance, with those who accused Hopkins of employing purely decorative rhetorical devices, while Reynolds was spared for having considered colour ‘inbred to form’. 4. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the capital of the literary world was still, and was no longer, London: for various reasons, other centres of writing awoke from their long torpor, like re-born Scotland, and Wales or Ireland. Feminist literature came of age: women turned their backs on the licentious genres they had practised formerly, and became the guardians of public morals. Bluestockings were born. The gamut of literary genres was enriched by the addition of the hymns of Watts and Wesley. What remained of didactic and sententious poetry gave way to the advance of more intimistic verse, often involving landscape; rhapsodic renderings of the poet’s torment rose against a background of the natural world that chimed perfectly with the feelings of the writer – dark, crepuscular if not blackest midnight, tempestuous rather than calm. We have already seen anticipations of this in Lady Winchilsea, Dyer and Thomson. Another herald of Romanticism was the ‘graveyard’ poetry of Gray, Blair and Young; this last, already in 1759, had been an advocate of the interpretation of poetry as pure genius, not imitation but expression of that mysterious process that is artistic creation. Right from the beginning, the novel had been a thorn in the side of poetical neoclassicism, because it reflected the untidy bustle of life, as well as its emotional aspects, curbed only by hypocritical moralism adopted to placate the female readership. Between 1760 and 1780, three strains of narrative fiction took shape and gained strength: the sentimental novel, derived from Sterne; the stories of domestic life; the Gothic novel of Walpole, followed by Mrs Radcliffe and many more. § 113. Goldsmith* I: Patriarchal society: nostalgia and defence Oliver Goldsmith (1728 or 1730–1774) is, in many ways, ‘the usual Irish writer’, assuming that such ethnic categorization has any validity at all. Like 1

*

Collected Works, ed. A. Friedman, 5 vols, Oxford 1966. Collected Letters, ed. K. C. Balderston, Cambridge 1928. The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, and Oliver Goldsmith, ed. R. H. Lonsdale, London 1969. A. Dobson, Life of Oliver Goldsmith, London 1888 (nicely summarized in CHI, vol. X, 195–216); R. M. Wardle, Oliver

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Farquhar before him, and, in part, Swift, and after him, Wilde, Joyce and Beckett, he possessed a sense of initiative that turned into enterprise, along with a natural loquacity, a gift for talking and telling tales that verged on braggery and braggadocio. His flexibility and versatility were proverbial, and in fact, like the other Irishmen I have mentioned, he excelled in the four main areas of literary composition: poetry, the novel, drama, and the essay, to which should be added the subgenres of criticism, journalism and popularization of this and that. His gracefulnees and talent were such that Dr Johnson observed of him: ‘nullum [genus] quod tetigit non ornavit’; in other words, like Midas, he turned to gold whatever he touched. Another gift is shared by the writers I have mentioned: they all excel in style, and in the parody of others’ style. Essentially, and necessarily, an Irish writer (this includes Goldsmith) is a misfit and an exile, at least in spirit. Our case in point, Goldsmith, was always penniless, as the little money he had went on expensive clothes, or was lent to those worse off than him. He was absentminded, naïve and vulnerable, like Beckett’s Murphy, and lost large sums at the gaming table. He was not exactly a political refugee, but left Ireland at more or less the same age as Joyce, around twenty, and never went back – in this, worse than Joyce himself. Both were connoisseurs of music, and practising musicians (Goldsmith played the flute), and were moved when they heard someone sing. Both turned to translation work when in need of money. At least two professional careers were contemplated and turned down: Goldsmith, the son of a clergyman, applied to a bishop for a place in the seminary, but was advisedly redirected, thanks, no doubt, to the Goldsmith, Lawrence, KS 1957; A. N. Jeffares, Oliver Goldsmith, London 1959; C. M. Kirk, Oliver Goldsmith, Boston, MA 1967; R. H. Hopkins, The True Genius of Oliver Goldsmith, Baltimore, MD 1969; R. Quintana, Oliver Goldsmith: A Georgian Study, London 1969; CRHE, ed. G. Rousseau, London 1974; A. L. Sells, Oliver Goldsmith: His Life and Works, London 1974; J. Ginger, The Notable Man: The Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith, London 1977; The Art of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. A. Swarbrick, London 1984; Oliver Goldsmith, ed. H. Bloom, New York 1987; B. S. Pathania, Goldsmith and Sentimental Comedy, New Delhi 1988; P. Dixon, Oliver Goldsmith Revisited, Boston, MA 1991; K. Worth, Sheridan and Goldsmith, London 1992; M. Griffin, Enlightenment in Ruins: The Geographies of Oliver Goldsmith, Lewisburg, PA 2013.

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bright red suit he was wearing at the time.1 He later practised as a doctor for a short time (medicine was Joyce’s intended profession too). Goldsmith also thought of embracing the legal profession; Joyce did not. Both died relatively young. To the Romantics and Victorian, Goldsmith was the author of sweetly, consolatory Christmas stories, but he has been revalued today as the author of a covert exposé of the colonization of Ireland.2 After the age of twenty, he became English through and through, but as a child he listened to a Gaelic-speaking friend telling old Celtic fables of witches, fairies, leprechauns and banshees, as well as the feats of legendary Irish chieftains. He treasured this native heritage, loved the music of the harp, and was one of the last to hear O’Carolan, the blind harpist, play.3 This Irish background appears in several of the fairy-tales he wrote for children, as well as those set in England, Greece and Rome, not to mention a story about ‘animate nature’, full of wonderful, grotesque visions. Of the five great novelists and writers of the middle and late eighteenth century, Goldsmith is undoubtedly the ‘lightweight’, and has attracted a varied, but usually lukewarm response from critics. There is no denying that his essential opus consists ‘only’ of two poems, one play, and a novel, the rest of his production being the work of a hack, albeit a highly talented one. The Vicar of Wakefield no doubt pales before the novels of Fielding, Sterne or Jane Austen, but to say that She Stoops to Conquer stands out only because the dramatic terrain around it is totally flat is, to my mind, to underestimate it quite seriously.4 2. Goldsmith’s colourful and picaresque life attracted the attention of a number of writers who were interested in the man and his works. One of the first biographies was by Washington Irving,5 followed by Forster, the biographer of Dickens, then by Macaulay and Dobson. Goldsmith was born in Kilkenny, or perhaps Lissoy, and entered Trinity College, Dublin, 1 2 3 4 5

The clergyman in The Deserted Village is completely different, and is described so lovingly and at length as to make the reader suspect that Goldsmith’s true vocation was, indeed, religious. DEA, 126–7. The subject of an essay in The Citizen of the World. DAI, vol. II, 1097. Daiches picks holes in Goldsmith in his section on him. Oliver Goldsmith: A Biography, London 1850.

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on the suggestion of a maternal uncle. The experience was doubly mortifying: Goldsmith’s family was poor, and as a ‘sizar’ he was forced to pay for his tuition and keep by serving the other students (Spenser did this too); his pock-marked face, the result of smallpox, led to his being pitilessly mocked by his fellow students. At Trinity he gave no signs of genius, or particular interest in his studies: in fact he was looked on as a mediocre, lazy student. Nonetheless, he succeeded in getting his BA in 1749, after which he spent some time hanging about the house, then enrolled in the medical school in Edinburgh. After a few months he had had enough of it, and left England for Leiden, or maybe Louvain, as many did in search of a degree in medicine. More importantly, he completed an epic European grand tour on foot, through France, Holland, Italy and Switzerland, which was to have a lasting effect on him. During his trip he lived by begging, playing the flute, and knocking at convent doors. He was probably the first on-the-road writer in history, a wandering author of no fixed abode. Once back in England, he settled in London, passing himself off as qualified doctor but unable to exhibit his diploma. So, sooner or later he was forced to take the only road open to men of talent – journalism, which he applied himself to in a small room wonderfully described in one of his poems.6 In the fifteen years he spent in London, Goldsmith made great show of fine clothes, treated and was treated to expensive meals, and, with his innate goodness of heart, helped his fellow men whenever possible. At Johnson’s Club no occasion was missed to snub and malign anyone held to be, like him, ingenuous or simple. Garrick is quoted as saying of Goldsmith that ‘he wrote like an angel, but talked like poor Poll’, not in itself a rare state of affairs and discernibile in many of today’s intellectuals too. A bit of a dark horse, he was quite capable of retorting, albeit with some delay, to jibes, as shown by his famous sally at Dr Johnson himself.7 Ironically

6 7

Aptly entitled, ‘Description of an Author’s Bedchamber’ mentions a fireplace ‘unconscious of a fire’, ‘five crack’d teacups’, and the nightcap that wreathes the author’s brow instead of ‘bay’. If Dr Johnson had written a fable involving fish, said Goldsmith, they would have spoken like whales. Retaliation is an unfinished collection of sardonic portraits of the members of this Johnsonian circle. A kind of get-back.

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for a doctor, even a bogus one like Goldsmith, he died while trying out on himself a medicine he believed to be miraculous, but which, instead, proved to be fatal. 3. ‘Good fellow’ though he was for his fellow men, Goldsmith was in no doubt as to where generosity ended and stupidity began. In his essays and first poems he distinguished between individual weakness and political responsibility castigating the surplus of superfluous goods and the nascent, if not actually established, consumer society, which impoverished the peasant, and while it deprived famers and shepherds of arable and pastoral areas in order to build mansions, parks and game estates for the rich, obliged agricultural workers to seek their fortune overseas. If Goldsmith cannot be classified a pre-Marxist, analytical and systematic critic of society, this is because his denunciations always end up by becoming lyrical, or elegiac, or as toothless as an elegantly written article for one of the fashionable journals of the day. Furthermore, his European tour had given him a wider, more objective outlook, and his interpretation of English issues and controversies was less provincial and more cosmopolitan than that of many of his fellow countrymen. His Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe (1759) is a pessimistic report that blamed the backward slide of all European culture on the lowering of the standard of education and consequently that of artistic practice, which resulted in a class of ‘scribblers’, while true genius was unable to make a living. The actor-manager, Garrick, was targeted – and he never forgave Goldsmith for this – as an example of the mediocre ware offered by London theatres. As a journalist at The Bee, which he also edited and wrote in 1759, Goldsmith created, along with his usual variations on current affairs, a series of insipid sketches which, useful though they were as limbering up exercises for a would-be writer, led to the newspaper’s demise after only eight numbers had appeared. The Citizen of the World (1762) met with greater success. This was the title given to a collection of 123 ‘Chinese letters’, modelled on Montesquieu and others (see Addison’s Spectator letters on the impressions of the Iroquois chiefs in London), which were supposed to have been written to a friend back in China by the sage, Lien Chi Altangi. In reality, as I mentioned, it was a fiction that allowed Goldsmith to observe dispassionately and objectively

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the values held dear in England, and their contraries, the passing fads, the situation of the arts, manners, and amusements. Ask any Englishman today about Goldsmith, and he will mention the vicar of Wakefield, but maybe the ‘man in black’ as well, who hides a merciful soul behind an exterior of apparent inflexibility and self-centredness; he might even add the name of Beau Tibbs, the elderly fop with yellowing silk stockings, a very much alive survivor of Restoration theatre.8 4. Goldsmith’s poetic career begins with a series of iconoclastic parodiescum-contestations of current literary genres: elegy becomes burlesque when every quatrain in praise of the deceased is followed by a malicious refrain, almost a deadly whispered aside, that reveals how hypocritical his/her goodness was, and how, behind the mask of the irreproachable moralist, lurked a despicable lecher. The elegy ‘on the death of a mad dog’ centres on a saintly person who gets bitten by a stray dog; the dog dies. The song of the hermit is about a vagabond who flees the ‘busy haunt of men’ and seeks refuge in unspoilt nature; in the rather far-fetched unwinding of the story, the ploy of disguise is exploited twice: the fugitive is a young woman who has lost her lover, and the lover turns out to be … the hermit. The Traveller (1764), the first of Goldsmith’s two more weighty compositions, is a wide-ranging ode on his 1755 tour through Europe; beneath the poetic surface lies a detailed analysis of the current political situation. It begins with a preface in prose that expresses concern over the present state of poetry and the fate that awaits it; it takes note of the disorientation of genres and prosody, as well as the conflict of opposing ideologies. It invokes, therefore, the establishment of a number of fixed points, whilst admitting that every political system has the right to choose its own road to justice and equity, if not equality, in society. Goldsmith’s persona in this poem is that of an exile who has learnt the futility of his wandering, and who longs for the hearth he has left behind, and the stability of the patriarchal family. He seeks peace,

8

The ‘beau’ par excellence, Richard Nash, was the subject of a biography by Goldsmith, who also wrote an unfinished memoir of Voltaire, and other biographical pieces on Bolingbroke and the poet, Parnell.

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but cannot find it, because peace is not somewhere outside, in this or that country, but within each individual. Goldsmith repeats his theory that it is an excess of commercialization that leads to the pursuit of luxury, and therefore corruptio optimi pessima. At the imaginary mountain crossroads, Goldsmith’s double looks down on Italy, and like Addison and Thomson sees a vision of inevitable decay caused by the preponderance of the sensual. The peasant of the Swiss Alps is recalled with affection and admiration because he represents the healthy, outdoor life that finds its reward in the joyous return, after a long day in the mountain meadows, to the warmth of his family and the unchanging cycle of village fairs and festivities. There is, however, a nagging suspicion that this simple, idyllic existence may not be sufficient to spur curiosity, set the intellect racing, and create what is known as the élan vital. The refinement, wit and elegance of France harbour its very decadence, praise of one’s fellow becomes adulation, which in turn dulls the recipient and delivers him hostage to vanity. Once again, Holland symbolizes the spirit of resistance against the advances of the sea; but industriousness generates excess and the ‘love of gain’. England would be the perfect rational state, well-balanced, averse to all forms of extremism, were it not undermined and disunited by an excessive cult of individual freedom. The appeal for unity, or reunification, and collaboration between all classes of society foreshadows Matthew Arnold. Without an equal growth for all classes, without due assistance being given to the poor, and due respect to the law, our tomorrow, says Goldsmith, looks bleak. The great evils of the time were enclosures and the resulting migration of the agricutural workers, with whom Goldsmith cannot but identify. Happiness is a mental dimension to be achieved through practical measures. 5. The Deserted Village (1770) is marked by wave upon wave of nostalgia that bring with them anaphoras of the most maudlin nature alternating with statements of theory, judgement and assessment of the problem of the depopulation of the countryside and eviction of farmworkers. In Wordsworthian style, the poem begins with recollections of the poet’s infancy and childhood, and all its accompanying pleasures; this is not just about the life of one man, but becomes a timeless symbol of everyone’s lost Eden. The ancient, archaic way of life was one in which work and play were not completely separated, the latter being seen as reward and rest after the

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former, in a historical period – and ahistorical at the same time – that came before the triumph of trade. In short, it is the utopia of the Romantics, and of Hopkins 100 years later. In this ‘Edenic’ period, the land sufficed; that is, it satisfied man’s primary needs without creating a surplus. This detail betrays the quietist’s dream that this ideal world might be preserved intact so as to be enjoyed by those who, after slaving and sweating in a hostile environment, have grown old, and long for a deserved rest. The part of the poem that involves the curate of the old village is an attack on those men of the cloth who scheme and seek promotion (The Traveller was dedicated to the poet’s brother, a lowly curate in some Irish parish). The celebration of the joyful traditions going back to feudal and medieval times is reminiscent of Gray’s Elegy. The rich despise true joy. In the end the poet once again denounces superfluities and luxury, which are, essentially, paid for by the labour of the poor. Goldsmith ends his poem with an invitation to all poets to take up his struggle and help to halt the process of degeneration before it is too late. § 114. Goldsmith II: ‘The Vicar of Wakefield’ The Vicar of Wakefield was first published in 1766, but was written perhaps four years earlier. The story goes that Johnson happened to read the manuscript, liked it, and took it to a publisher, from whom he managed to squeeze the sixty pounds Goldsmith needed to pay his rent. In this, his only novel, Goldsmith inserts some autobiographical elements left over from his poetry, reserving others for the theatre. He used the novel to amplify his by now radicated ideas on the need for reform in society and letters. His father, like the vicar, Primrose, had actually been forced to farm a small piece of land in order to make up for the exiguous living provided by his benefice. One of many children, Goldsmith is camouflaged in both the vicar and and his eldest son, George, who sets out to seek his fortune in the wide world. When he returns to the family hearth, he recounts his adventures, which are based on those of the author himself. In London, George decides to try his luck in Grub Street, hacking for a while for the more established denizens of the literary jungle. He discards the idea of emigrating to America, and tries his hand at a whole variety of jobs, like teaching English to the Dutch without knowing a word of Dutch, or

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teaching Greek. When in Italy, George earned his keep by ‘free disputation’. So, in this novel, the author inserts many of his actual experiences acquired during his epic walking tour of 1755.9 Vicar Primrose has several stubborn ideas on theology – he has written pamphlets on monogamy10 – as well as on politics and literature, and he defends these ideas with easy eloquence, precision and charm. In the meeting with the ‘political gentleman’, the vicar expounds an involuntarily radical theory on the total equality of all citizens, and a prophetic division of the country into three classes – the rich, the poor, and, in the middle, ‘the people’, by which is meant the rising middle class. Contemporary poetry was too artificial and frivolous; as for the theatre, Farquhar and Congreve wrote in a way that was too ‘literary’ as opposed to how people spoke. It made one regret the passing of Dryden. 2. Enlightenment optimism was an obstinate ‘given’ that resisted all proof to the contrary; vicar Primrose is another Candide, who insists on not seeing what is before his eyes. Seraphically serene, he sees good intentions behind actions that are dictated by ulterior motives. He may be aware, as he trots out his axioms in the course of the story, that reality will demolish his certainties one after the other. The proof ? His shrewish wife and vain daughters. His daughters are hypocritical as regards Squire Thornhill, and say the opposite of what they think. The vicar notes this and admits it. On the other hand, Wakefield is the ‘primeval’ village abandoned by the family, in that the vicar loses all he has when he entrusts a scoundrel with his possessions; but there is another Wakefield, to which the family, chastened and ‘reduced’, returns after a biblical expulsion. The name of the place is only slightly less auspicious than Auburn. Just as eloquent and significant is the name ‘Primrose’. The initial suggestion is that the family lived in the best of possible worlds, were it not for the fact that the gullible vicar was a goose surrounded by foxes. The sky was a deep blue, dotted only by the occasional 9 10

The dispute between the other son and Thornhill, laden with high-sounding pseudoAristotelian terminology, is undoubtedly indebted to Goldsmith’s own university career. Cf. WATT, 166–7 (who, however, does not mention Goldsmith, but only Richardson) on the contemporary, widespread debate concerning polygamy and monogamy.

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small cloud sent by providence to remind men to be grateful. Naturally, in Eden the economy is based on disinterested exchange, and the vicar gives everything he does not actually need to the poor. In the following regime, too, the economy is one of subsistence: there is neither too much nor too little, but just the right amount, with nothing in excess. The recipe for life is ‘primeval simplicity’. The word ‘primeval’ is found several times in the text, and becomes a kind of signal in code. Goldsmith repeats what he has said in his poetry: the excess of one vain person is sufficient to clothe 100 of the poor. Eden survives in this later, surrogate form because the sense of simple, old-fashioned contentedness is still alive – sitting round the fire, drinking gooseberry wine, telling tales of times gone by, and singing good old country songs. His son, Moses, is given the task of going to the fair to sell the old nag, but, such is his blind naïvety,11 he spends the money on 144 pairs of silver-rimmed glasses. He thinks he has made a bargain, but, obviously he has been cheated. His father decides to go back to the fair and sell their other horse to an old man with whom he gets into a learned disquisition on the creation of the world. The buyer turns out to be another cheat, whose bill is worthless. These two episodes represent the triumph of human stupidity and a satire on self-righteousness. But they are also a gamble, for the moment lost by blind optimism, on human nature. It is also a criticism of the the mania for self-promotion, something the vicar is unable to eradicate from his wife and daughters (the sale of the horses was to fund their debut in the fashionable world of London). 3. The delightful deftness with which Goldsmith handles the narration in the first part disappears in the second, submerged by a mutiplicity of standard tricks and stratagems more at home in romance or surrealistic farce, such as disclosed identities, coups de théâtre, characters believed dead brought back to life, and sudden conversions. The procedure might be called picaresque and concentric: almost every character is brought back on stage, including the old con man from the fair, recognized in the prison by his blathering on about philosophy. This old cheat is a deus ex machina who collaborates in the happy ending, helped by the mysterious 11

There is another case of mistaken identity when the vicar takes the butler for the squire of a neighbouring manor.

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Mr Burchell. Like the Duke in Measure for Measure, he has been around since the beginning, employed by the Primrose family as a simple farm hand, and revealed, in the end, to be the noble knight, Sir William Thornhill, who denounces and partly converts to righteousness his nephew, guilty of seducing one of the vicar’s daughters. Resuming work on the story after the lapse of four years may have led Goldsmith to relativize and weaken his main character, but not to question him. In the prison episode, he appears too complacent and not up to the various situations; his speeches sound like shrill tickings-off in the mouth of some Quixotic character. Primrose’s utopianism is revealed when he undertakes a revolutionary reorganization of prison life based on humanitarian principles, such as Foucault’s maxim ‘alleviate rather than punish’, and gives a real sermon in which he ultimately says that it is better to be poor because poverty brings us closer to death. All the right marriages are celebrated, the fraudulent banker who had made off with the vicar’s money in the first part is arrested, and the status quo is re-established. § 115. Goldsmith III: The plays. Psycho-social mechanisms unmasked and exorcized In 1773 Goldsmith published an essay on the theoretical aspects of drama, in which he distinguished between the comic and the sentimental, and announced his reasons for preferring the former, which he saw as more effective in fighting evil than the sentimental genre, where vice is often treated with indulgence. In actual practice, in his two comedies a balance between the comic and the sentimental leads him to the antipodes of, for example, a Charles Churchill at his most brutal and Juvenalian. The Good Natur’d Man (1768) is, in fact, another version of corruptio optimi pessima, and may be interpreted as an admission by the author of his excessive goodness, which made him an easy prey for cheats and con-men, or as the illustration of an axiom regarding suitable behaviour. It is also a benevolent satire on profit, which holds men hostage, now and always. Goldsmith’s remedy for all evils is a healthy sense of balance. At the beginning of the play, an old tutor disinherits his nephew, Honeywood, guilty, paradoxically, of loving his fellow-men too much – in short, of being too much of a philanthropist. The old man urges him – and the audience – to think hard

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about how far generosity should be taken, with an implicit warning that this noble feeling can become foolish self-indulgence. Love of justice must not entail harm to oneself, otherwise it becomes folly. Goldsmith, who had thought of becoming a clergyman, rejects Christ’s exhortation to ‘turn the other cheek’ and opts, instead, for judicious, motivated succour. In the play, Honeywood even acts as a go-between, so that the woman who loves him (with the inauspicious name of Richland) marries the son of Croaker, an excellently drawn character representing a pessimist who afflicts those near him with his apocalyptic warnings of doom but is, at the same time, a classic hen-pecked husband. In the course of the action, Goldsmith explores the theme of misunderstanding and mistaken identity, in that Leontine, Croaker’s son, has brought back home from France not his sister, as is believed, but a young English convent pupil, Olivia, whom he loves with requited love, so much so that they agree to marry in secret. The mistaken identity and the plot are gradually revealed to everyone except the father, Croaker. In the meantime, Leontine is engaged to marry Richland, who will, so he thinks, refuse him because she loves Honeywood. The latter, instead, is set on encouraging her marriage to Leontine. When Honeywood finds himself penniless owing to his excessive goodness, and under house arrest, two policemen present themselves to Richland disguised as naval officers, creating considerable embarassment. To crown it all, Honeywood lends his support to another proposal of marriage made to Richland by a certain Lofty, one of those devious, presumptuous politicians with a finger in every pie, of the kind that people the pages of Trollope’s novels. Before the denouement, Croaker intercepts a letter that he misreads as proof of a ‘gunpowder plot’ to blow up his house, while, in another scene, Honeywood intercedes on Lofty’s account with Richland, who thinks that when Honeywood refers to an ‘honest friend’ he is really speaking about himself in the third person. An Italian reader will no doubt see in this goodness – which becomes the attribute of a person who in the Neapolitan dialect is called ‘fesso’12 – 12

The play exudes a facile anti-Catholicism that Goldsmith evidently thought would meet the taste of his audiences and guarantee box-office success: old Croaker ‘croaks’ against the Jesuits, accusing them of the imaginary plot; Olivia was forced by her father to study in a French convent before being ‘rescued’ by the impetuous Leontine.

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distant announcements of the plays of Pirandello and Eduardo De Filippo. Richland ends up by standing bail for Honeywood, thus frustrating the punishment of his uncle, while a voice off stage (the author’s) reminds us of something Mandeville might have said, that excessive generosity is an act of exhibitionism. The protagonist is about to leave in desperation, but is caught in time by Richland, who, in a spirit of healthy opportunism, and without much ado, agrees to marry him. 2. Judging by Garrick’s verse prologue to She Stoops to Conquer13 (1773) it might seem that Goldsmith has laid aside his satirical and critical agenda, and now presents a comedy of pure amusement, the only hint of controversy being the dig at the sentimental drama then in fashion. However, right from the start, the comic is tinged with the grotesque and the ambiguous. The protagonist, Marlow, is presented as almost a clinical case, as he suffers from a kind of sexual trauma which he masks with nonchalant reticence. The fact is, he is shy, awkward and aloof with highborn ladies, but forward, even lecherous with maidservants, waitresses and the like; he also frequents prostitutes. This Jekyll and Hyde syndrome might be seen as a pathological safety valve to relieve the stress of oppressive behavioural codes. In Act II, Kate adds salt to the wound when she denounces the stifling effect of the hypocrisy that holds Marlow prisoner. Many of the characters in the play are also victims of psychological and social pressures, either absolute and general, or peculiar to the historical context. Children have to fight against parents who try to impose husbands or wives on them for reasons of convenience; or who try to force them into this or that profession, or make them study things of no interest to them. Fashion is, in all this, a factor as important as money. Everything natural and spontaneous is submerged by artificiality. Hardcastle’s servants, too, must impersonate other identities to impress. Goldsmith can be credited with having given Dickens the idea of the nervous tic as a symptom of trauma, malaise, affection deficit and various other kinds of psychological suffering. We gradually become aware that Goldsmith here, as elsewhere, is exploring political and social issues. 13

It should be borne in mind that Tony Lumpkin is Mrs Hardcastle’s son from her first marriage, and Kate is the daughter of Mr Hardcastle from his; the two are, therefore, step-siblings.

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Kate’s clothes are too elegant and use too much silk, and ‘the indigent world could be clothed out of the trimmings of the vain’. She eliminates the superfluous and dresses modestly in the evening, just to please her father, thus showing that she, too, has two faces and two ‘personalities’. The old patriarchal values are represented by Hardcastle, the old-fashioned father, who is, however, so weak, confused and innocuous that he fails to convince as a character. Thus fades the secret hope, always nurtured by Goldsmith, that the country may be considered the home of health and sanity, just as the city is the place of perdition, folly and vice: the country, too, is now about to be infected by folly, and metamophosed into a static, retrograde vision of the past, with no value as a model for the present. 3. This play has traditionally been criticized for being based on too many implausible coincidences, but this is, I believe, its greatest strength: it is a refined, complex mosaic made up of pieces from earlier plays. Shakespeare is there at the very beginning, parodied, of course: the quarrelling lovers will ring an easy bell. Tony Lumpkin is a latter-day Hamlet who guides the plot and moves the puppets. The overall story is also a parody of King Lear: Tony, the apparently foolish son of Mrs Hardcastle, invents for the benefit of the two young Londoners, Marlow and his friend Hastings, lost in the darkness in a desolate land, not just a place but two new identities as well, just as Edgar does for blind Lear: in other words, he leads them to Hardcastle’s home making them believe it is an inn.14 Shakespeare reappears in the fifth act, when Tony has the coach circle the house several times, making his mother and Constance Neville think they have been taken a great distance, to ‘Aunt Pedigree’. Above all, Marlow, the man with two lives, reminds us of Marston’s Dutch Courtesan.15 Critics have also unearthed a vast number of borrowings from Farquhar, Shadwell and Congreve; but something also points towards a future parody: Marlow is an unwitting, or, at least, not fully conscious, Ernest (The Importance of Being Earnest) because, as Kate accuses him, he has two masks: with the ladies of his London circles he is Mr Rattle, while for the serving girls in the country he is Marlow the shy. The plot itself is a clockwork mechanism 14 15

This part of the plot is drawn from a real episode in the life of the author. Volume 1, § 107.2.

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resembling a romantic thriller, or a house of cards standing up miraculously, forever on the point of falling, and falling in fact in the final scene. The diegetic director is Tony Lumpkin, country tippler, only apparently vague, in reality sharp-witted and resourceful.16 On one hand, he fights off the blandishments and bribes of his mother, who promises him the sum of 1500 pounds if only he will marry his cousin, Constance; on the other, he organizes two plots in the name of amusement and youthful defiance. He is in love with a local maidservant, while Constance, his betrothed, is in love with Hastings, friend to Marlow, who has been forced by his father to call on his future father-in-law prior to the arranged wedding. The comedy, unusually respectful of the unities of place and time (everything happens in the three or four hours between sunset and complete darkness), begins in the inn, where Tony has gone for a drink or two with friends. Enter Marlow and Hastings, who, in search of somewhere to spend the night, have been directed here by Tony himself, taken in by his account of its whereabouts. Goldsmith skilfully spins out, to fill the five acts, the true identities of both place and people. The various dialogues are comic because old Hardcastle is unaware that Marlow and Hastings think they are in an inn, and that he, Hardcastle, is the inn-keeper. The plot progresses thanks to the fact that the misunderstanding is discovered by some but not by others; in particular, Constance and Hastings, once in on the secret, decide to go along with the game and keep Marlow and old Hardcastle in the dark. Kate, treated with aloofness by Marlow when they first meet, decides to dress up as a maidservant to make him feel more at ease. The courting scene is delightful and spontaneous: Marlow becomes obsessed with the ‘maidservant’, and the play could easily turn into the story of a rake and of a rape. In the dead of night, the exasperated Hardcastle makes up his mind to turn Marlow out; Marlow answers with a request that should resolve everything: ‘My bill, I say’. Just then, Marlow’s father arrives, and we think the misunderstanding is at its last gasp. Instead, the equivocation continues: Marlow still believes that Kate and the ‘maidservant’ are two different people, and when Kate 16

Tony seems a distant relation of the Honeywood of The Good Natur’d Man when he helps Constance and Hastings to elope by stealing his mother’s jewelry box. The plan fails because of yet another false move by Marlow.

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reveals that she is a poor relation, that Marlow, a slave to convention, cannot marry. When Mrs Hardcastle thinks her son is really about to get engaged to Constance, she discovers in a letter that this future daughter-in-law is about to elope with her lover. The two subplots are superbly interlaced in Act V before converging on the happy ending. In a series of nocturnal mixups17 Marlow, who swears before his father and possible father-in-law that he has never courted Kate, is put to the proof, spied on, and unmasked, at the very moment when, in the most surreal scene of the play, Mrs Hardcastle believes that an unknown aggressor (in actual fact, her husband) is about to kill her son, and falls on her knees to beg him to desist. § 116. Richardson* I: Case histories and objectives of the seduction triptych In the almost sixty years of potentially creative life, and the actual twenty these were reduced to after a late beginning as a novelist, Samuel Richardson (1689–1761) wrote and published – the fact is worthy of 17

The original title was The Mistakes of a Night.

*

The Shakespeare Head Edition of the Novels, 19 vols, Oxford 1930–1932, is currently being replaced by the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Samuel Richardson, scheduled in 12 vols, ed. T. Keymer and P. Sabor, Cambridge 2010–; the most authorative editions of the individual novels remain: Pamela, ed. T. Keymer and A. Wakely, Oxford 2001; Clarissa, ed. A. Ross, Harmondsworth 1985; Sir Charles Grandison, ed. J. Harris, Oxford 1972. Complete correspondence, ed. Keymer and Sabor in 12 vols, being printed, Cambridge 2013–. Selected Letters, ed. J. Carroll, Oxford 1964; Familiar Letters, ed. B. W. Downs, London 1928. Samuel Richardson’s Published Commentary on ‘Clarissa’ 1747–1765, ed. T. Keymer and O. M. Brack, 3 vols, London 1998. A. D. McKillop, Samuel Richardson, Printer and Novelist, Chapel Hill, NC 1936, 1960; W. M. Sale, Jr, Samuel Richardson: Master Printer, Ithaca, NY 1950; R. F. Brissenden, Samuel Richardson, London 1958; M. Golden, Richardson’s Characters, Ann Arbor, MI 1963; A. M. Kearney, Samuel Richardson, London 1968; Samuel Richardson: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. J. Carroll, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1969; I. Konigsberg, Samuel Richardson and the Dramatic Novel, Lexington, KY 1968; I. Gopnik, A Theory of Style and Richardson’s ‘Clarissa’, The Hague 1970; D. L. Ball, Samuel Richardson’s Theory of Fiction, The Hague 1971; T. C. Duncan Eaves and B. D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography, Oxford 1971; C. G. Wolff, Samuel Richardson and the Eighteenth-Century Puritan Character, Hamden, CT 1972; M. Kinkead-Weekes, Samuel Richardson: Dramatic Novelist, London 1973; E. B. Brophy, Samuel Richardson: The Triumph of Craft, Knoxville, TN 1974, and Samuel

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note – only three novels, which are, however, immensely long. A rough estimate gives Clarissa, the longest ‘serious’ novel in English, as four times the length of Pamela, which in turn is about as long as the average Victorian serial novel. Sir Charles Grandison is nearly as long as Clarissa. These three novels should be seen as three panels of the same triptych, or three distinct narrative hypotheses closely connected and coordinated dialectically. Furthermore, they are all epistolary novels. There is some truth in the objection that the epistolary styles vary little or not at all, and that all the writers of letters in these novels tend to use the same sort of impersonal voice – quite unlike, for example, Smollett, whose characters write in a highly idiosyncratic manner that serves to identify them. Each of the three collections of letters, of which Richardson pretends to be the editor, rather than author, covers a period from January to January (the actual years are unspecified). They are letters of dramatic mimesis, written, as Richardson says, ‘on the moment’, focusing on moods in the process of formation, devoid of space-time contextualization, and with only rare and fleeting descriptions of landscape. It is also true that there is no great aesthetic distance between the novels: Pamela is the foundation text of psychological and sentimental epistolary fiction, while Richardson, Boston, MA 1987; M. A. Doody, A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson, Oxford 1974; V. Poggi, Messaggio e mito in ‘Clarissa’ di Samuel Richardson, Modena 1974; A. M. Kearney, Samuel Richardson, ‘Clarissa’, London 1975; W. Warner, Reading ‘Clarissa’: The Struggles of Interpretation, New Haven, CT 1979; T. Castle, Clarissa’s Ciphers: Meaning and Disruption in Richardson’s ‘Clarissa’, Ithaca, NY 1982; T. Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality, and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson, Oxford and Minneapolis, MN 1982; C. H. Flynn, Samuel Richardson: A Man of Letters, Princeton, NJ 1982; E. Paganelli, Dio, donna e denaro in ‘Clarissa’ di S. Richardson, Brescia 1984; Samuel Richardson: Passion and Prudence, ed. V. G. Myer, London 1986; J. Harris, Samuel Richardson, Cambridge 1987; Samuel Richardson: Tercentenary Essays, ed. M. A. Doody and P. Sabor, Cambridge 1989; T. Keymer, Richardson’s Clarissa and the Eighteenth-Century Reader, Cambridge 1992; T. Gwilliam, Samuel Richardson’s Fictions of Gender, Stanford, CA 1993; Clarissa and Her Readers: New Essays for the Clarissa Project, ed. E. Copeland and C. H. Flynn, New York 1999; Passion and Virtue: Essays on the Novels of Samuel Richardson, ed. D. Blewett, Toronto 2001; The Pamela Controversy: Criticisms and Adaptations of Samuel Richardson’s ‘Pamela’ 1740–1750, ed. T. Keymer and P. Sabor, 6 vols, London 2001; Clarissa: The Eighteenth-Century Responses 1747–1804, ed. L. E. Bueler, 2 vols, New York 2010.

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Clarissa marks the apogee of the genre, or subgenre; Grandison is interesting, heavy though it is in its structure and slightly insipid in the Italian part of the story. We might even see the novels as three books of a Dantesque ‘Human Divine Comedy’, in fact a totally ‘Human’ comedy;1 not, however, following the original order of Hell-Purgatory-Paradise. There is no doubt that Richardson could well have written a fourth novel, if not more, but decided, instead, to stop at three – the number of perfection. If not Dantesque, his three novels taken together constitute a Goethian whole, a Faust story in three rather than two parts, embodying as it does the idea of the salvation of a seduced woman,2 whose identity is fragmented into two or more models of the feminine. So, there are no significant records of apprenticeship in Richardson, none of the usual acerbity of youth, wrong turnings, apologies, or dispersive and long-winded experiments. Debuting with Pamela he proved to himself his innate teleology and became the driven author of a single story; furthermore, unlike most other writers of the time, he did not dilute or waste his talent on other literary forms: he wrote no plays and no poetry. Nor did he dabble in journalism or other activities that beckoned to the dwellers of Grub Street. His three novels are sisters, if not triplets, as regards both form and contents. They invent, or re-launch, or, better, present as an absolute novelty on the European scene the sentimental epistolary novel.3 In each, the plot hinges on a single event with protagonists and outcomes that are different but similar and symmetrical, as well as slightly, or sometimes, crucially varied. The key event is attempted seduction – in one case, actual rape – of a woman by a seducer. In two cases the seducer is a rake, one of whom is converted to virtue by the remonstrances of his victim, while the other is not. In the third novel, the male protagonist is a paragon of virtue and sexual continence. The first victim to be seduced is rewarded by a marriage that lifts her up into the ranks of aristocracy. In the tragic second case, the victim resists with superhuman strength until death comes and turns her into a martyr. The two epilogues are analogous: Clarissa is rewarded not in this life but in the hereafter, but hers 1 2 3

Cazamian (CHI, vol. X, 9) cites Dante, but only with reference to Clarissa. The comparison between Clarissa and Goethe’s Gretchen is frequent, and it was first made by Taine (TAI, vol. III, 272) and recalled by Praz in PRA, 96. For some forerunners of the feminist epistolary novel cf. § 71.

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is still a case of ‘virtue rewarded’. In Grandison, reasonable compromises lead to marriages that satisfy and resolve the opposite situation: Grandison has not exactly been seduced after the assault of two seductresses; he is simply loved and asked for in marriage by two virtuous ladies, and marries after pondering which is the most suitable and fitting for him. Here the figure of the seducer becomes secondary: Sir Hargrave Pollexfen attempts to breach the virginity of Miss Byron, or to force her into marriage without her consent. It might be more exact to say that Grandison is a homologue of Pamela in her role as sublime model of married femininity in the second volume of her novel. In the tripartite construction, Richardson sounds the depths of possible cases of human failings in dealing with the passé but not quite extinct phenomenon of the rake against a background of the impositions of a patriarchal society and an education that insists on temperance and the control of one’s impulses. In Pamela the narrative lingers on minimal mood shifts, recording the evolution of the protagonist’s feelings, while, in the other two novels, the reader witnesses a more objective conflict of points of view. 2. It is often said that Richardson became a novelist, and that particular kind of novelist, by chance: this is only true in part. It was not impossible or rare for a printer to become a writer, or vice versa; in fact, it was quite natural. The son of a joiner, or, rather, a cabinet maker, Richardson was at first destined to become an Anglican clergyman, but was forced to give up his studies through lack of means. At the age of seventeen he was apprenticed to a London printer. He was an efficient and trustworthy employee, and, after marrying his employer’s daughter, opened a printing shop of his own. He rose quickly in his trade, acquired considerable wealth, and after becoming president of the Stationers’ Company, succeeded in procuring a number of valuable government contracts and commissions. The first signs of a budding epistolary novelist appeared in the twelveyear-old Richardson who began writing letters for the illiterate girls of the neighbourhood, managing to empathize with them. Another forty years were to pass, years of incubation in obscurity, punctuated with the odd self-conscious approach to compilative,4 not creative, writing, before he 4

In 1732 he wrote a handbook for apprentice printers, and in 1738 edited a new edition of Defoe’s Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain. In 1739 he edited and partially re-wrote L’Estrange’s Aesop.

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sat down to his first novel. In 1739 he was commissioned by two London booksellers to write facsimiles of letters for illiterates or people who were not very good at writing. One of these was supposed to be from a young servant-girl to her parents, complaining of the advances of her master, in itself, a frequent occurrence. Richardson had a flash of inspiration, and remembering a real event he had witnessed some twenty-five years earlier, put aside the rest of the repertoire of facsimiles,5 and threw himself into teasing out and working out the story that was to become Pamela, which he completed in only two months. Though not considerd to be his masterpiece, Pamela initiated a craze that was more European than English. At home, the novel was criticized, and, above all, parodied, because of the presumed hypocrisy of the heroine, who was seen as opportunistic and calculating. Fielding countered with Shamela, and after Clarissa published Tom Jones, to which, in turn, Richardson responded with his authentically virtuous hero, Grandison. Richardson’s novels, snubbed and derided by professional writers with a more carefree morality, do however constititute the first important historical phenomenon of the popular ‘best-seller’. The target audience of Clarissa, the lower and middle class, mistook fiction for reality, anticipating the Victorian reaction to the death of little Nell, that is, establishing a direct line of communication between author and readers that was to be one of the characteristics and raisons d’être of the Victorian novel.6 In France, instead, Richardson was a huge success, praised by Diderot, Rousseau and Voltaire. In Germany and Italy, too, his influence was felt by Goethe and Goldoni. The reason for his enormous success lies in his taking up and re-launching certain timeless myths that were to be redefined and transformed well beyond the Victorian age. In Richardson’s novels the great allegorical syntheses of Dante and Bunyan meet and live again. Lovelace is often compared with Satan the tempter in Paradise Regained, and the figure of the demonic male, largely animal yet endowed with the gift of insinuating, seductive speech, will be found not far from the haunts of the Brontë sisters.7 Pamela is herself the mother of a whole brood of delicate, anaemic girls, passive and terrified by the thought 5 6 7

This handbook of letters was published under the title of Familiar Letters in 1741. Identification with the novel produced hysterical phenomena of collective anxiety, and church bells were rung for Pamela’s wedding. WATT, 263.

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of sex, devoid of desire outside of marriage that will be found in droves in the Gothic novel and the novel of terror.8 3. There is no better summary of the three novels by Richardson, and the simple, one might even say naïve, didactic agenda contained in them, than the preface to Grandison: the novels are, the author states, three incitements to virtue, rewarded in this life or in the life to come. However, critics soon began to suspect that, consciously or not, Richardson actually meant something quite different to what he affirmed in words – the opposite, in fact. Coleridge’s interpretation, perfected by Praz, posits a transfer onto the male characters of the author’s secret sadistic urges – even in Grandison, who makes those he loves suffer. In his study of the eighteenth-century novel, Ian Watt presents a thorough reconstruction of the sociological background of Richardson’s oeuvre:9 the readership he addressed was first of all the female middle class, who had more free time than others for reading, and were brought up and schooled in the Puritan marriage ideology, basically patriarchal, but leavened with respect for the rights of women to self-determination. Richardson himself was a Puritan and could not but hold and teach a utilitaristic concept of virtue, and approve of the equation whereby prosperity in this life is a sign of divine justification. The three chapters that Watt dedicates to Richardson already contain the seeds of more ‘advanced’ interpretations – psychological, psychoanalytical and proto-deconstructionist. After him, critical reception of the novels slowly comes almost full circle, revealing undercurrents of repressed sensuality in his heroines and signalling semi-conscious or decidedly subconcious projections and taboos in the narrator himself. According to D. H. Lawrence, Pamela is both a lay sermon and a pornographic book intended to procure sexual arousal. He backs up his interpretation with a clinical chart of the author, who was, in his opinion: obsessed with the idea of success; frustrated

8

9

WATT, 182. See also R. P. Utter and G. and B. Needham, Pamela’s Daughters, London 1937. The name Pamela was taken from Sidney’s Arcadia; normally accented on the first syllable, it is accented on the second syllable in Pope’s ‘Epistle to Miss Boult’, recalling the meaning of the word in Greek (‘all sweetness’). It is also the first name of some English women novelist of the recent past. This should be read with D. Hill, ‘Clarissa Harlowe and Her Times’ (1955), reprinted in Carroll 1969, 102–23.

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by his exclusion from the ranks of professional novelists, who were generally university graduates or aristocrats; affected by some kind of neurological malaise. In the last thirty years, feminist critics have swooped on this male novelist who places a woman right at the heart of two of his three colossal novels. At first sight, no one would dream of accusing Richardson of misogyny: two of his male protagonists are scoundrels, one is converted, the other is punished; his heroines are always virtuous and pious;10 we find pallid manifestations of the diabolical, Satanic female in Clementina and Charlotte Grandison, or in Laurana, Clementina’s rival in Grandison, explicitly called ‘the devil’s daughter’. Of course, feminism is forever faithful to an unshakeable mystique that cannot by definition admit that women’s liberation from patriarchal slavery can ever be said to have been achieved; or that a male narrator might be in favour of the demolition of the patriarchal system. The journey continues, metaphorically and ontologically; women may expect no compensation for wrongs suffered in the past, and can look for no social elevation. The present feminist position on Richardson is that he unmasks ‘patriarchy’, but props it up as well. At the same time, feminist critics should be thanked for bringing back into the limelight a forgotten writer, for reviving a guttering academic debate, and for making available for reading, albeit in abridged editions, novels that were read and enjoyed by readers such as Jane Austen, George Eliot11 and Henry James, but, in our modern world of pre-packed, takeaway culture, are largely ignored. Even Johnson, who held Richardson in great esteem, confessed that ‘if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself ’. Reader’s response criticism has argued that Richardson’s very writings, by sugaring the pill for the reader/patient, 10 In reality, cf. the perceptive comment in n. 1 of Paganelli 1984, 95 where, quoting Watt, she conjectures that the surname Harlowe may allude to ‘harlot’. This might just be applicable to Clarissa on earth, but in heaven she is the purest of the pure. 11 George Eliot bowed, albeit stiffly, to Grandison, untroubled by the moralizing. Meanwhile, Taine (TAI, vol. III, 284–8) slated the same novel in a kind of open letter to the novelist. It is likely that the pious philanthropist, George Eliot’s Deronda, was modelled on Grandison, repeatedly analysed in Eliot’s letters, though another echo, this time ironic and negative, is that of the name ‘Grandcourt’, Gwendolen’s husband in Daniel Deronda.

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are, themselves, an act of seduction; hence the frequent use of the word ‘titillate’ when speaking of his novels. § 117. Richardson II: ‘Pamela’ I. Letter-mad maidservant redeems rake The first of the two volumes that make up Pamela (1740) presents itself as a celebration of virtuous poverty and, at the same time, from a Puritan perspective, of the material rewards of such a condition. The second volume (1742) portrays a utopian rebirth of English society based on a profound spirit of democracy and a bold repudiation of class distinction.12 At the end of the second volume, and, therefore, of the novel as a whole, Richardson drops his ‘editor’ mask and spells out the lessons to be learnt from the story of Pamela – meaning, above all, the rules of behaviour to be observed by the country gentry and the servant class. The latter, obviously, is represented by sixteen-year-old Pamela Andrews, the object of the unwelcome attentions of the son of her mistress (whose death sets in motion the events narrated). Pamela stands firm against the attempt to seduce her, and ‘converts’ her master into marrying her. In the end she becomes a beacon of virtue, especially for the degenerate nobility. It was a deplorable norm in the mid-eighteenth century for masters to sexually abuse their female servants; Pamela’s master is doing nothing out of the ordinary, or scandalous, by attempting to seduce her, and offering, in exchange for her compliance, to help out her impecunious father, and, when this does not work, offering money directly to her. In one of her first letters, Pamela observes that the world must be coming to an end, ‘for all the gentlemen about are as bad as he’, and refers to the numerous illegitimate children born in neighbouring squires’ homes as a reminder of the consequences of such hanky-panky. While there may be maidservants who offer no resistance to their masters, Pamela pities those poor girls who are forced to take employment in what are dens of vice. Richardson’s novel is meant to warn defenceless girls like Pamela of what awaits them.13 Mr B, the would-be seducer (his name is reduced to a single initial, perhaps to suggest a whole social class, not just 12 13

They actually appeared as two ‘parts’, divided, in turn, into two volumes. Polly the servant’s affair with the feckless Mr H in the second volume is the confirmation of the rule to which Pamela is an exception.

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an individual)14 can afford to torment Pamela precisely because he is rich (‘power and riches never want advocates’). Pamela responds to his advances with a mixture of passiveness and energy, resignation and tenacity, helplessness and resourcefulness.15 At the beginning she is more or less in the same situation as Defoe’s Moll Flanders, but her line of action is the exact opposite to hers. Like Moll, Pamela is a pretty serving girl who is wooed with money and fine clothes, but while Moll errs through necessity, and is justified by world-wise Defoe, Pamela does not think her poverty sufficient reason to commit a sin: ‘I am honest, though poor’. Subsequently she employs in defending her chastity the same tenacity and wiles used by Moll in her ‘immoral’ pursuit of wealth. They both achieve the same goal, the only difference being that Pamela reverses and repudiates Moll’s pointless pessimism, replacing it with the redemptive power of virtue.16 2. Pamela defends herself by means of a weapon usually reserved to the upper class, and completely out of reach of the poor; she uses this weapon both for defence and offence, and soon may be said to have become ‘mistress’ of it; the ‘weapon’ is, obviously, the written and spoken word. From the start, Pamela is an exception: she is a servant, but dresses like a member of the upper class, thus arousing the envy of her fellows; she admits to having studied singing and dancing, things far above her status, while she would have been better off learning the hard, humble tasks consonant to her class. She has become an avid reader, thanks to her late mistress,

14 Critics are silent on this initial. I propose the following: the pronunciation of the letter B alludes to the insect, which stings and may be considered a phallic symbol. Goldsmith was to found, in 1759, a paper called The Bee (§ 113.3). Fielding (§ 121.4–6) completes the name as Mr Booby, a term which needs no explanation. 15 The exchange chimes with that in Manzoni’s The Betrothed, substituting Pamela with Lucia and Mr B with Don Rodrigo. 16 Pamela’s parents are given a farm in Kent by Mr B; so, for them, too, it is a case of virtue being a source of material well-being and a way out of poverty. They acknowledge him as the ‘second maker’ of their fortune (the first is God). While Moll washes her hands of her children, Pamela not only takes care of her own – she becomes quite an expert in pedagogy and puts her marriage at risk by insisting on raising her child by herself – but she even goes so far as to adopt Miss Goodwin, Mr B’s illegitimate daughter.

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who gave her free access to the library; but, most important of all, she has taught herself the art of writing letters. For her, letters are vital, as a source of both information and pleasure; indeed, the pleasure becomes narcissistic when she writes for no other reason than to be able to re-read at leisure her epistolary composition. She becomes not just proficient, but professional, filing away proverbs, turns of phrase, discourses that deserve to be memorized and maybe used again.17 In short, she is not just literate but literary – a writer, a poet, even.18 That writing is a form of transgression and violation of class prerogatives is seen from Mr B’s continuous complaints about Pamela’s reading or writing too much, as if these activities were detrimental to her duties as a servant. When she is transferred to Lincolnshire, letter-writing is her only mode of transgression: she leaves pens everywhere; her whole day is dedicated to writing; soon she lives only for and in words – ‘what is left me but words?’19 Highly skilled in the dialectics of debate, she can hold her own against her master precisely because she has read widely, not, however, the same kind of texts her master draws inspiration from, but, principally, the Bible and other edifying books. Pamela is a triumphant tribute to the Bible and its formative power, not just religious, but social, too. The essential lesson to be learned is that the Bible is the foundation of all. 3. For the period in which Pamela is subjected to Mr B’s attempts to seduce her in his Bedfordshire residence, the novel is strictly epistolary; it becomes more of a diary in Lincolnshire, where she is transferred by 17 18

19

Jealous of her letters, when she has to show them to Mr B, she makes brief summaries just in case they are lost. For instance, she composes verses on her departure for Lincolnshire, and revises cleverly, adapting it to her own situation, Psalm 137. In her letters literary similes and erudite references are frequent: she applies to herself Aesop’s fable of the improvident grasshopper admonished by the ants, and that of the country mouse and the city mouse; she also identifies herself with the ‘poor sheep’ while Mrs Jewkes, the guardian in the Lincolnshire farm, is the ‘wolf ’. Pamela’s exclamation before the seducer in one of his attacks is taken, by her own admission, from a book read one or two nights before, and the exchange of jokes is a tissue of literary quotations. When leaving, she refuses valuable presents from the other servants, asking only for writing paper, pens and ink.

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guile (the man used to deliver her letters to her family is in the pay of Mr B, who is shown them by this disloyal ‘postman’) and kept prisoner. The flow of letters is interrupted when Richardson intervenes in person – very seldom, in fact – to communicate facts that cannot be related in the letters.20 The diary part, in turn, contains numerous transcriptions of letters sent, received, or simply read. The problem with the diary structure is that the diarist cannot act and write at the same time, but only refer to scheduled events (the Thursday of Pamela’s and Mr B’s wedding is described at length in five or six entries). The letters start again towards the end of the volume, while in the second the diary form is again used (diary kept for Miss Darnford) with the arrival of Lady Davers, Mr B’s sister. Pamela’s letters are literally ‘dramatic’ (the epistolary novel has much in common with drama, beginning with the necessity of relating what has gone before); they usually speak not of an event that has happened, but one that is happening. The very first one, for example, breaks off when the master comes into the room and resumes to tell of Pamela’s alarm. Letter XXIII, too, is dynamic, interrupted in the middle by another visit, and then continuing with an account of the visit itself. Letters XXIV and XXV are full of suspense: the former ends with the revelation by a servant in a note he hands to Pamela, that, during the night, the master swore he would enjoy her. The following letter begins with a flurry of exclamations and interjections to the effect that her chastity is intact. Letter XXX, too, leaves the reader in suspense: Pamela is about to make a crucial decision – whether or not to give in to Mr B, who is begging her to remain. The typical letter in the second volume differs from that of the first, as Pamela herself states, in that the style is more elevated, less simple and direct, and the number of correspondents has increased; besides her parents (the only people she writes to in volume one, apart from Mr B), she addresses letters to Lady Davers and Miss Darnford. An impression of greater scope and colour is given by the few letters written by Miss Darnford – mischievous and spontaneous – and the one letter written by Sir Simon, which is bubbly and slightly satirical. 20 ‘My story surely would furnish out a surprising kind of novel, if it was to be well told’, says Pamela, and Richardson declares he has not added so much as a single comma to her account.

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4. The dramatic centre of the first volume of Pamela is undoubtedly the succession of coups de théâtre that constitute the seducer’s assault on the defenceless girl, and her reactions to his molestation. If, up to a certain point, Pamela is Mr B’s prisoner, later on their roles are reversed. At first grateful to her master for his attentions, Pamela soon recognizes in him, rather melodramatically, the fallen angel that becomes Satan. Given her resistance, Mr B falls back on defamation and slander, but Pamela not only stands up to him but gets the better of him in their duels of words. The conflict soon becomes one of values and horizons: in Mr B’s terms, Pamela is insolent and ungrateful in refusing his advances, while according to her principles, she would really be those things if she accepted. The roles are reversed in that the master, once the inquisitor and interrogator, becomes the target of inquisition and interrogation when Pamela rises to the fore, demonstrating she is not at all the confused, timid, trembling maiden he thinks she is. Deprived of victory, Mr B is forced to change tactics: Pamela, who discovers she is surrounded by traitors and spies, is imprisoned by her diabolical persecutor in his Lincolnshire residence, in the ‘safe-keeping’ of the governess, Mrs Jewkes, a far cry from the affectionate Mrs Jervis. Mr B threatens to marry her off to the chaplain of the estate, but Pamela succeeds in making him her friend and accomplice. They communicate through notes hidden between two paving stones near a sunflower in the garden.21 Pamela studies ways of escaping, following to the letter the evangelical precept: ‘Be as innocent as doves, but as cunning as serpents’. To the question, ‘Is Pamela sexually repressed?’, the answer is ‘no’. She is not insensible at the start to Mr B’s supposed love (as Lady Danvers, Mr B’s sister, will shrewdly insinuate); she merely observes that it borders on hatred, while his roughness is produced by his frustration and his inability to control or repress his emotions. She refuses the chaplain’s marriage proposal (which her parents advise her to accept) thanks to a kind of sixth sense – not exclusively opportunistic – that tells her Mr B is about to give in (he shows himself to 21

The chaplain asks for help for Pamela from a class of gentry that is indifferent, pusillanimous, apathetic, or simply in league with the powerful (there is also a priest who is a version of Manzoni’s Don Abbondio). The episode of the carp, which is caught and then thrown back into the water, is significant.

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be a tactless young buck, much given to faux pas). The approaching change is discernible in her confession that she cannot bring herself to hate Mr B when she finds out that he has nearly drowned, and in Mr B’s hesitation and dithering when he has her at his mercy.22 Seduction by means of coercion having failed (there is a scene worthy of pantomime in which this Don Juan dresses up as a maidservant), Mr B tries a softer approach: his declaration of love by the side of a pond obviously raises the problem of the sincerity of this sudden change of heart. An extenuating tug-of-war is brought to an end by two events: Mr B agrees to set her free to return to her parents; on her way back, she is overcome by emotion, feels the stirring within her of pity, and even love, and decides to go back to Mr B of her own accord. 5. With this, the novel poses an unexpected query: is the ‘virtue rewarded’ of the sub-heading Pamela’s or the reformed seducer’s? The unlikelihood of the spontaneous return, noticed by her parents, too, is matched by that of Mr B’s transformation and regeneration, and the speed with which Pamela slips into her role as blushing bride, welcomed by those very nobles who before had turned a blind eye to her persecution. Among those are the shrewd Sir Simon, a grey-haired rake who makes fun of Pamela’s scruples and her father’s straitlacedness, and his sour daughter, Miss Darnford, rejected in the past by Mr B himself. Mr B is jealous to the bitter end, and even after his conversion, never misses a chance of alluding to Pamela’s past ploys, and at the very height of his generosity (he has just confided that he has left her everything in his will) cannot but make her promise that she will never marry the chaplain. There is a road to Damascus for Pamela, too: she is now convinced of the inscrutability of providence, and interprets her own story in a completely different way: the flight from Mr B, which she thought would make her happy, would, in fact, have been her ruin. She realizes that she has been tested, and that only through this experience can she attain happiness. Pamela, who is superstitious, wants to get married on a Monday, Mr B on a Thursday. Richardson draws a veil over events immediately after the wedding, and is chastely silent on Pamela’s 22 During the armistice, or tug-of-war that precedes his capitulation, Mr B shows Pamela a curious document consisting of ‘articles’, that reads like a parody of Christ’s temptations in the desert: all this and more will be yours if you give yourself to me.

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reactions and sensations in experiencing the sexual concourse she had once abhorred. M. B’s formerly volcanic desire is now alluded to euphemistically in his eagerness to see her pregnant. At the same time, he busies himself in purging her of the little in her that is not noble; he teaches her French and instructs her in poetry and the countries she will pass through on her grand tour (she will undertake this on becoming a fully integrated member of the nobility).23 In other words, Mr B subjects Pamela, who is noble in spirit, but not by birth, to a period of training in those few points in which her education or breeding is lacking, and she learns so well and quickly that she is soon independent and capable of expressing informed opinions. Only one thing threatens to spoil the happy ending: Mr B’s sister, when told of the imminent wedding, comes to her brother’s house and finds Pamela alone. She subjects her to a long interrogation in order to extract a confession that she has slept with her brother; above all, she tries to insinuate the doubt in Pamela’s mind that she is only the latest in a string of conquests. Pamela has to use all her quickwittedness and verbal prowess to defend herself from the fury of this woman, who sees in her brother’s marriage the downfall of a system of values: her only reason for acting is to preserve the purity of her race. Later, this woman intones an indictment before Mr B and his bride, in which she accuses him of many other affairs: Richardson deliberately draws this out in order to underline the obstinacy and narrow-mindedness of an entire social class. At the end, however, the shrew is tamed, and Mrs Davers becomes Pamela’s second victim.

23

In the second volume, Pamela returns from her grand tour in a position to assess objectively the benefits and advantages of the current mania for everything foreign. After due consideration, she disapproves of it in all its forms. She is proud of being English, and draws a picture of an ideal gentleman who is able to examine imported cultural models and classify them correctly. She considers Latin to be irrelevant (except for the Latin of the Bible). Her perfect gentleman must give a good example, and mould his wife if she is from a lower class. The only problem is that men like Mr B are few and far between, while women are usually far superior to men.

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§ 118. Richardson III: ‘Pamela’ II. Degenerate nobility reformed from below In the second volume of the novel, which, the author tells us in his preface, was not originally planned, but was written only to prevent and stem apocryphal sequels, Pamela is blissfully esconced, save for a short-lived threat, in her role as wife, mother and teacher. Without the suspense of the first volume, it is far inferior to it. The first letters are dull, colourless and insipid: for page after page, nothing happens; instead, the closing events of the previous part of the story are served up again, and Pamela bursts out into emphatic exclamations of happiness and gratitude. In what follows there is a great deal of repetition of material from the previous volume. The rhythm of the narration is fragmented, with more intersecting plots owing to the greater number of correspondents; many letters are simply gratuitous or digressive, while others present static pictures with very little interconnection, though they are enlivened by humorous and satirical sketches depicting a nobility enamoured of verbal jousting and battles of wit – and, above all, Pamela’s great ability to emerge unscathed from the most compromising situations. These pictures also testify to the unsustainability of an aristocracy based on name and birth rather than election.24 When Pamela is allowed into the ranks of high society as the wife of Mr B, Richardson puts forward a new model of society in which divisions of class and wealth are abolished, and the only discriminating factor is virtue. This is what Pamela suggests to Miss Darnford in her dealings with a suitor: the criterion for choosing a husband is merit, all the better if accompanied by wealth. Around Pamela and Mr B, Richardson gathers a group of noblemen, each of whom at first makes categorical affirmations of scornful conservatism intended to preserve the exclusiveness of their class, and then, thanks to Pamela’s moralizing influence, is converted to a less rigid mentality; the married Pamela becomes the real mirror of nobility. The first of these figures is Mrs Davers, who realizes that Pamela possesses naturally 24 A lengthy essay concludes the two volumes, with Pamela’s sensible reactions to and comments on Locke’s Treatise on Education. This is a variant of the epistolary form, or rather, a pathological outcrop, since Pamela writes it in the form of a letter to Mr B, who is present in the room at the time.

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what the nobles fail to acquire with all their education, and that her letters, handed around, improve and ennoble all who read them. Pamela’s good influence extends to the evil governess, Mrs Jewkes, who is miraculously converted to a life of honesty and virtue. Pamela, therefore, denounces the degenerate, spineless ruling class and, at the same time, is living proof of the power to reform that lies with the poor and honest. The reform of the nobility becomes the prime objective, and, in the end, it is Mr B, its prototypical representative, who recognizes that new blood is needed to bring about this reform. The ease with which Pamela accepts the fruit of her husband’s previous philandering, his illegitimate daughter, is a sign of the author’s optimistic faith in the feasibility of this road to change.25 The concept of virtue as the answer to the country’s woes pushes politics into second place: Mr B turns down the offer of a knighthood, saying ‘titles […] are but appearances’. 2. The new English gentleman is designed both by those who, in the course of the novel have been reformed thanks to Pamela’s influence and, in the abstract, by the long conversations between her and Mr B, full of sociological analyses. There is an exception to the trend of spontaneous conversion effected by Pamela’s example: the irredeemable roué, Sir Simon Darnford, alone in resisting Pamela’s example and influence (or at least in standing out against her), writes a number of letters containing rare instances of comic obstinacy – completely wrong, but appealing, in a way – that form an ironic commentary on all the songs of praise raised up for Pamela. He claims the right to disagree, fears the contagion of virtue that threatens to become an epidemic, and extols transgression as the spice of life (as well as reminding Mr B of his own sinful past). Helped by Pamela, Mr B takes on the role of enlightened fustigator and reformer of the degenerate nobility, of which he has first-hand knowledge since he

25

This is confirmed by the ‘minor’ incident of Mr B’s infatuation for the countess, who repents, but blames her friends for her fall (they connived with her, urging her on; or at least, did nothing to stop her). She does examine her conscience but, like Mr B and the story of his pursuit of Pamela, admits to a few failings on her part, and a host of extenuating circumstances. Richardson seems to be slyly suggesting that the sin is minor, controlled, and was committed with dignity.

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is a member of the same class. He makes an unforgiving analysis of the contemporary English nobleman: totally lacking in self-control, given to outbursts of rage, spoilt, pampered, adulated by governesses, teachers, and, above all, parents, he will contract only a marriage of convenience, not of love, in line with the wishes of ‘tyrannical parents or guardians’. The couple’s marital happiness is, in its uniqueness, the confirmation of – and suggested cure for – an institution tottering on the brink of collapse, about which all are deeply pessimistic.26 Mr B foresees the imminent demise of the kind of marriage in which the husband is almost always a ‘tyrant’ and the wife always told to be quiet (a ‘yawning’ husband with a ‘vapourish wife’) and admits that he himself only married because he met a woman like Pamela. So, he implies that it is society that breeds rakes. There is only one cloud in the otherwise clear blue sky, but one that threatens to turn everything into a tragedy: Mr B’s ‘fling’ during a week spent in London (as in Moll Flanders, the centre not just of luxury but of licence too, and depravity in all its forms). The episode has a happy ending, making their union stronger.27 A further effect is to make Pamela’s halo even bigger and more glowing. The storm is preceded by a series of telegraphic, prophetic letters: just as she accepted her social elevation with composure, so now she is calm and dignified when she learns of her husband’s adultery. With sorrow, and the same stately dignity she showed in resisting the assault of her, then, diabolical seducer, she now contemplates the life that awaits her as a separated or repudiated wife, and steels herself to face a visit from her ‘rival’.28 Still more indicative of her moral stature is that she acknowledges she is socially inferior compared to a countess, and in so doing, diminishes the gravity of her husband’s behaviour; she is, she says, willing to stand aside if he really loves the other woman, as long as she can keep her son.

26 Just for a moment, the problem of polygamy is broached and debated when Mr B and the countess concede its plausibility. Both change their minds immediately, while Pamela roundly censures ‘Platonic love’ as ‘Platonic nonsense’. 27 She ends up by considering the adultery a ‘good thing’, because it has enabled her to rid herself at long last of her jealousy, previously listed as one of her fixations. 28 On the brink of delirium Pamela stages a mock trial, the back of three chairs acting as the dock, and an armchair as the judge’s bench.

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With a rapidity that is nothing short of miraculous, Mr B, overcome by such nobility of soul, is redeemed all over again, just as before regarding his lecherous intentions. So now Pamela is able to recount even the most titillating details of this affair to Lady Davers, thus turning it into a kind of novel for the amusement of the nobility. Indeed, as her husband describes his extra-marital ‘crash’, she gradually begins to feel she can understand the countess. In the end, they become friends. 3. The London episode gives us a striking picture of the cultural life of contemporary England. The theatre, potentially a source of clean, healthy enjoyment, is backward in castigating vices, and its moral efficacy is greatly compromised as a result. Referring to a translation of a French tragedy, Pamela stigmatizes the perversion of sentiments, the lack of respect shown towards the gentle sex, the portrayal of uncontrolled passion and the licentious language used. When she turns her attention to Steele’s The Tender Husband and Italian opera, she finds only sound, devoid of the necessary accompaniment of edifying contents. Pamela’s ideas on literature, and, indirectly, Richardson’s too, become clearer when the heroine, who has taken on the education of her own offspring, denounces the ‘tribe of poets’, and their ‘delirious and exciting descriptions’, and rails against all literature that is languid, listless, excessively decorative, since these traits are the visible signs of inner moral laxness. In one of the last scenes she is seen reprimanding four fainting young ladies who have a weakness for precisely this kind of writing. She comes out with a telling parody of the style she disapproves of, and follows it up with a profession of faith in ‘a plain, simple, easy, natural and unaffected language’. In the preface to the second volume, Richardson, who describes the letters, of which he is the editor, as true to nature, is clearly, but paradoxically behind Pamela, when she attacks contemporary novels as too much given to intrigue and improbable events and characters. The dissertation on Locke’s Treatise on Education with which the novel ends is Pamela’s last intervention as an educator and pedagogue; it not only contains a criticism of Locke’s excessive theorizing and lack of practical experience, but blames the corruption of English nobility on an inefficient system of public education, and, in the private sphere, on the entrusting of children to parasitical, immoral tutors, as well as on the the permissiveness of parents and domestic servants. With the portrait of

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the new, responsible master, and his model ‘public school’, based on competition, Richardson looks ahead to Thomas Arnold and Rugby. § 119. Richardson IV: ‘Clarissa’ Seven years in the writing, Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady29 appeared between 1747 and 1748 in seven instalments or ‘volumes’, the first four in two sets of two, the others as a three-volume publication. Between the publications, Richardson received, and acknowledged, letters from fans asking, indeed begging him to spare the heroine, who had announced her intention of letting herself die, or at least, doing nothing to remain alive, once she was raped by Lovelace. Richardson would not budge; he repeated his refusal not only of a reparatory marriage, but of the very idea of poetic justice, insofar as the only true judge is Almighty God (and, anyway, as is evident from the words of Addison quoted by Richardson in an appendix, there would otherwise be no room in literature for tragedy). Richardson’s architectural skill in Clarissa is matchless, stupefying, the product of a truly great mind. He constructs a massive, solid building firmly set on its foundations; at a closer look, it is seen to be composed of a Byzantine or Baroque multiplicity of layers and components – an intricate interplay of moves and countermoves, ploys, ripostes and retorts, pauses and delays, feints, misunderstandings, never-ending tugs-of-war – all responding, however, to a clear allegorical and anagogic design, which is relentless and inexorable, and, paradoxically, even swift in its journey to its conclusion. With this novel, Richardson more than deserves a place among the master builders, or, if you like, master jewellers, capable of producing the most intricate objects of intersecting and overlapping strands of gold and silver, which though delicate are also firmly held together. Compared with Pamela, therefore, the architectural idea is more complex, if only because of the weaving together of epistolary threads to produce a fabric in which personal recollections collide and conflict, making the reconstruction of facts and events difficult and ambiguous, turning the representation of the thoughts and emotions of the characters into something like the 29 References are to the letters as numbered in the edition by A. Ross, 1985.

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meandering of a majestic river, rather than the impetuous flow of a mountain steam. The novel is a scrupulous file, an enormous archive of numbered epistolary exhibits (537 in all, plus a preface, conclusion and postscript); in many cases, the same missive contains sections marked by letters of the alphabet; these are ‘letters within letters’, like Chinese boxes.30 With monklike precision, each letter bears the day of the week, and, though not always, the time of the day, along with the date and month. The year, however, is never given, for the sake of mimesis; and almost never, the place. Some, at times three or four, bear the same date. All together, the action takes place in just less than one solar year (from January to December). The effects of Richardson’s ‘instantaneous writing’ procedure are unmistakable compared with, say, Robinson, Gulliver or The Vicar of Wakefield: each letter constitutes a self-enclosed narrative micro-cell that contains events that have just happened or are happening, and that cannot be connected logically or interpreted ex post. What Richardson presents is a series of images which are partial because they depend on the limited perspective of the writer. Some letters arrive late because the writer lives far away; others are written and sent before the receipt of others that would contain an answer or make the original letter redundant. With this technique, the connection between facts is seen to escape the writers. Moreover, the same things are interpreted from different points of view depending on the epistolary thread, thus endowing the novel with greater realism, so that in some letters the focus is sharp, in others more fuzzy and arbitrary. Clarissa is the first narrator, and, vicariously, playwright, since she narrates successive events and dialogues. Seldom does Richardson venture into stylistic mimesis like Smollett, with the exception of one or two letters from Solmes, the suitor, or a couple from minor semi-illiterate characters.31 The organization of the material is polyphonic, already Browning-like, especially when an event is described several times by different correspondents, and, as in the epilogue, referred to by third parties who have witnessed it. I have mentioned 30 31

As in music catalogues, every letter, or letter within a letter, is easily identified thanks to the letter L followed by the number of that particular letter. Also reminiscent of Smollett are several amusing incidental episodes, like the one concerning Clarissa’s uncle and his courtship of Anna Howe’s widowed mother.

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Browning because it might seriously be argued that the form and contents of Clarissa were a source of inspiration, albeit a minor one, for The Ring and the Book. In Browning’s poem a saintly maid dies pronouncing the same mystic messages, surrounded by a halo of martyrdom and sanctity like Clarissa, in a similar ‘building’ that struck Henry James as being rather like a Gothic cathedral.32 The aesthetics of reception was to be the same, and Browning’s work was presented to the public in two blocks, suggesting that, like Clarissa, it is to be read, not at one sitting, but split up, and slowly. These works by Richardson and Browning are ideal for television serialization, as they cannot (and could not) be digested in one piece.33 At the same time, Clarissa presents in epistolary form the tranche de vie of mid- and late nineteenth-century ‘verismo’, with the seducer or manager of a prostitution ring who hides the kidnapped noble lady in a brothel (Balzac, Zola), along with other anticipations of opera plots. In fact, many early nineteenth-century operas have a scene in which the heroine is shown raving, not because of some affront to her honour, or not only that, but because of frustrated love or an imposed marriage. The motif of the fallen woman and of the ‘awakened conscience’ will become a a favourite, not just of writers, but of other artists too: one of the most famous works of the painter Holman Hunt is The Awakening Conscience (1853), whose title echoes the ‘awakened conscience’ that Lovelace claims as his own in letter 397. 2. The difference between Clarissa and Pamela is that the former is no servant but a member of the wealthy country landowning class. Lovelace is a Mr B who succeeds in perpetrating a rape (while in Pamela the rape is intended but never carried out), but then repents, without, however, convincing the victim of his sincerity. The story is paradigmatic because, using the lamp of fiction, it describes the predicament of women at the time. Clarissa, as a woman, had no power of decision; far less was she able to prevent and denounce her rape and bring Lovelace to justice, protected as he was by the privilege of his class. The only way a victim of rape could regain her honour was through a reparatory marriage. Clarissa is caught 32 33

Volume 4, § 126.3. Cf. V. Poggi’s acute observations in the preface to the Italian edition of Pamela, Milano 2005, xviii–xxii, on the Italian television series, Elisa di Rivombrosa.

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in a dilemma between obedience to her father and her independence – a scruple that is exceptional in a family context that displays the very essence of unscrupulousness in the persons of her siblings, Arabella and James, and in her father. The task of her confidante, Anna Howe, who flirts with a rich suitor she ends up marrying, is to goad Clarissa, who makes a formal protest that her relation with Lovelace is completely innocent. The hidden cause of Lovelace’s libertinism lies in his past experience: he has been jilted by his fiancée, and this has left a wound which, instead of healing, has festered into vindictive and perverted misogyny; he sullies the idea of love by lusting after the bodies of young, innocent girls, who once he has had his pleasure of them, are left with the reputation of little more than prostitutes.34 At first he is not the external seducer; Clarissa’s own family, with the possible exception of the mother, applies the Foucaultian solution of detention when Clarissa refuses an economically advantageous match with the gormless Solmes. She is threatened with an even greater degree of isolation, in a dwelling surrounded by a ‘moat’, like Mariana in Shakespeare35 or Tennyson. All emergency exits are sealed, one after the other, and her only way out is to give in to Lovelace’s blandishment. With her consensual kidnapping Clarissa begins a new life in the brothel where Lovelace’s other victims are kept. Lovelace wavers, uncertain whether to marry Clarissa or continue with his lies and tricks in an attempt to deflower her. She is so bewildered that when Lovelace feigns an attack of vomiting, she thinks this too is part of his plan to seduce her, like the fire that breaks out in the house.36 Her escape is clumsy and poorly prepared, and lends some credence to the theory that she did not really want to get away, and that she is not completely conscious of what she is doing. Once back in 34 ‘Lovelace’ is the name of the Cavalier poet, Richard Lovelace, but his character may have been based on Lothario in Rowe’s The Fair Penitent (§ 140.2). What is certain is that, semantically, his name signifies ‘without love’. On the onomastics of the main characters, see the ambiguities brought to light by Watt, who posits a secret identification of the author with Lovelace, and a diminished quotient of virtue in Clarissa (WATT, 269 n. 1). 35 See V. G. Myer’s interesting study, ‘Well Read in Shakespeare’ (Myer 1986, 126–32), on Shakespearean allusions and quotations in Clarissa. 36 This incident will be taken and reshaped in Jane Eyre.

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her ‘prison’, an unusually short letter implies that Lovelace has had his way with her (letter 257).37 The description of Clarissa’s attack of madness is an early example of mimetic typographic writing, with lines slanting on the page and notes jotted here and there. Then Clarissa pulls herself together and rejects Lovelace’s offer of marriage. Her mind is made up. 3. As a result of the rape, paradoxically, Clarissa is no longer in the power of her persecutor. She has a flash of illumination: since she was raped while under the influence of a narcotic, she was a totally unwilling victim, and Lovelace cannot be considered a victor. Clarissa knows she is a fallen woman (at least, in the eyes of society), but, now all her dreams and aspirations have been dashed, she can face the situtation with unclouded vision. She wards off the proposals of the now contrite Lovelace, who declares he is ready to marry her, indeed begs her to accept him. Richardson, like Manzoni, explicitly states that the law cannot be expected to help her in any way, because of its age-old subservience to the powerful. Tragedy becomes farce when Clarissa is arrested for not paying the rent, and reported by one of the prostitutes in the brothel. The novel takes a more transcendental turn when Belford, Lovelace’s bosom friend, expresses amazement at his friend’s intransigence, and, after actually meeting Clarissa, begins his own journey towards redemption, attributing to her his change of heart. In the description of a dream Lovelace has, Richardson alludes to the various Don Juans on the European scene (after all, Lovelace is a burlador, among other things), especially when his protagonist sees the earth open before him and he falls through the hole into hell. A tragically ironic letter from Clarissa informs the gullible Lovelace that she is about to go ‘to her father’s house’; she has to explain to him that she is speaking metaphorically. The cupio dissolvi finds expression in trance-like actions, like the purchase of a wooden coffin decorated with all the insignia of death. Lovelace keeps repeating that he has repented, but is systematically turned away from her door, and so, never sees her dying. When she is more dead than alive, Clarissa forgives him. After her death, Lovelace demands her heart as a relic: he is given a lock of her 37

So the rape is merely hinted at, and Lovelace does not dwell on the details. This disconcerting reticence has led some to think that there was, in fact, no rape, and that Lovelace is impotent.

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hair, instead, but even that turns out to be false. Clarissa leaves her money to the poor, and Belford is appointed editor of her memoirs, which will serve as admonition and advice for women. With a denouement like this, which contains elements of heroism and leanings towards Catholicism,38 Richardson appears to have turned a corner: Clarissa sacrifices herself, and in so doing becomes a symbol for contemporary women and a clarion call to rebel against the chains imposed on them by society. The gesture is both anticipatory and anachronistic, because Clarissa is modelled on the great women of classical tragedy, as well as on those in the Elizabethan theatre and in Dryden, and goes against the ‘syntagmatic’ religiousness of the time. It may also have been an answer to those who accused Pamela, and Richardson, of presenting a form of religion that was self-interested and opportunistic. In any case, for feminists, to seek a solution for crises in the supernatural is tantamount to admitting the defeat of ‘the cause’. At the end of the novel Lovelace thinks it wise to repair to France, then Austria and Italy. At Trento, Morden, Clarissa’s cousin, catches up with him. Morden wants revenge (‘mord’ suggests ‘murder’), and, as in Hamlet, this Morden is the atavistic Executioner. Poetic justice is served, and at the end the battlefield is strewn with corpses, many of Clarissa’s relatives having fallen. Lovelace’s death is reported in the last letter, from his valet, or second.39 § 120. Richardson V: ‘Sir Charles Grandison’ Richardson set about the writing of Grandison with anything but enthusiasm, as if foreseeing the many difficulties it would encounter when

38

The religious order of the Poor Clares was founded by St Clare after having fled, like Richardson’s Clarissa, from her father’s house; in a painting by Simone Martini the saint is depicted holding the white lily which is also the symbol of the fictional character. There is no doubt that the sacrificial resonance of the name of Richardson’s character reached Virginia Woolf, who gave the name of Clarissa to the heroine of Mrs Dalloway. 39 The scene represents a tragic parody of the code of chivalry in literature, with the duellers carrying out in a foreign land a mortal ritual which is forbidden in England, though it is a cardinal point of the medieval episteme, and exchanging words in French.

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the time came to publish it.40 He had no clear work plan; the bare bones of the plot acquired muscle mass and sinew thanks to suggestions and encouragement from his reading public, which called for a male counterpart to the virtuous heroine of his first two novels, and an answer to Tom Jones.41 So, in a sense, Grandison is a choral work, with Richardson in the part of the choirmaster: he weighs up the proposals and suggestions, especially from female readers, and decides how and if to use them. Compared to the earlier novels, there is nothing new on the ideological and moral plane. If anything, the letters take on a more clearly theatrical nature, with lines attributed to the various characters, just like in the script of a play. Once again, the rhythm of the letters and events reflects a peaceful domestic environment, in which the middle-class ‘actors’ have relaxed, and discuss in civilized conversations on various subjects, such as the relative merits of Shakespeare and Milton, duelling, or the position of women in eighteenth-century society. Nothing sensationally dramatic occurs to disturb the peace, except for the kidnapping of Harriet Byron; but even that does not last long. Many are the letters recounting the background to present circumstances: the history of the Grandison family fills page upon page, and things that happened before the novel begins are meticulously narrated. Grandison is another exceedingly long work, but the length is in some way offset by being presented as a series of instalments in three blocks, and is justified by greater analysis and by the stereophonic effect of the epistolary technique. It is immediately clear – presumably – that Sir Charles Grandison will end up by marrying the chaste and virtuous Harriet Byron, but this happpy union of like souls is put off and delayed by various events and twists of the plots that follow hotfoot on 40 Published in instalments, or volumes, again in the number of seven, the first four in November 1753, two more in December of the same year, and a final one in March 1754. It was shorter than intended because the publication of an unauthorized version in Dublin was understood to be imminent. Two further editions, much revised, followed. Of particular importance are the 1762 one (the fourth edition), and the 1810 one, edited by Mrs Barbauld. The Oxford edition by J. Harris, which is the one I have used, is based on the first edition. 41 The back and forth between Richardson and Fielding will be described below at the beginning of each section dealing with Fielding’s individual novels.

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one another, or act together in this tour de force of procrastination. The stitches of the subplots and those of the main story do not coincide, but the resulting hiatuses are in no way detrimental to the reader’s enjoyment. Important happenings, like the kidnapping of Harriet and her release from the clutches of Sir Hargrave Pollexfen, are summarized in a first short letter. This is followed by a letter containing a more detailed description. The greatest obstacle to the expected happy ending is Grandison’s love for the Italian Clementina della Porretta, which constitutes the longest, most sentimental, melodramatic and – tout court – ‘romantic’ section of the whole novel. With its rather conventional morbid tones, it seems to herald the imminent arrival of Mrs Radcliffe’s Gothic masterpieces. After two novels based on a female icon of virtue, with Grandison Richardson brings a man centre stage. The key to the action, however, lies no longer in the transcendental realms of superhuman strength and self-sacrifice, but in the very human, very eighteenth-century concept of self-control. 2. At twenty, Harriet Byron has lost both her parents. She has also inherited a great deal of money, which makes her an appetizing match for a number of fortune hunters. She leaves the house of her uncle Selby, and goes to London to stay with her cousins, the Reeves. Here she is courted by various suitors, whom she describes in detail in her letters to her cousin, her main correspondent. Her descriptions are marked by a touch of superciliousness and vanity. She appears to revel in the furore she has created, and when the haughty Sir Hargrave Pollexfen complains of having been offended, she answers him tit-for-tat. Grandison is absent; in fact, he belongs to the category of heroes that turn up almost at the last minute. During a masked ball, Pollexfen decides to kidnap Harriet. Once again, we find one of Richardson’s favourite motifs, the sequestered maiden. Harriet is kept hidden in the house of a widow. After she attempts to escape, Pollexfen decides to transfer her to his estate in Windsor. Grandison, who has been conjured back out of thin air, happens to be in the vicinity and hears her cries and pleas. He frees her and hands her over to his brother-in-law. Pollexfen demands satisfaction, and challenges him to a duel. Grandison dissuades him. Pollexfen then makes Harriet a formal proposal of marriage, which she turns down, also because she has secretly fallen in love

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with Grandison. From the masked ball on, the plot is carried forward and made known through a series of letters written by Grandison’s sister, who tells one of her correspondents that Harriet has been saved thanks to the miraculous intervention of her brother. At this point, the epistolary narration turns to events before the kidnapping. These are recounted in a letter to her friend, Lucy Selby, by Harriet herself, who has recovered from her traumatic experience. As later in Browning, the aggression and liberation are recounted twice, by the rescuer and the rescued. In the light of the love that has, understandably, blossomed between Harriet and Grandison, the latter is forced to reveal his engagement to the Marchioness della Porretta. With Harriet’s attempts to discover something of Grandison’s goings-on in Italy, the novelist is clearly trying to enliven a sluggish story. That the great nineteenth-century serial novel is just round the corner can be seen by the fact that Grandison, too, is a kind of epistolary serial in three blocks, and Richardson shrewdly ends the first instalment on the promise of revelation of the hero’s love life. 3. The reader of the second volume sits down ready to be told all about Grandison’s love-life, as promised at the end of the first volume, only to find that he is being led round in circles without ever getting to the point. The novel expatiates on Grandison’s many acts of disinterested philanthropy, and how he is always ready to help his fellow-men, and, especially, young orphan girls in distress.42 After the stirring scenes of the masked ball, the kidnapping, and the threat of seduction and forced marriage with Pollexfen, the novel grinds to a halt in a lull full of random, routine events. It is Grandison himself who reveals his past. Dozens of detailed letters from his principal male confidant make up a feuilleton with an Italian setting that culminates in Clementina’s prolonged catalepsis. Torn between religion and love, she realizes she cannot marry a Protestant, while Grandison is determined not to become a Catholic, besieged though he be by Clementina’s family and by the usual Catholic priests and prelates. The epistolary account of Clementina’s personal, prolonged calvary is

42 Occasional visits are made to comfort Pollexfen, who becomes a moral wreck and dies before the end of the novel.

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alternated in real time with Harriet’s English letters. Once the flash-back is over, Grandison still has to solve the problem of whether to give up his religion43 or his girl. New heights of pathos are reached when he returns to Bologna to assist Clementina, now in the throes of madness.44 The slow convalescence in Bologna is monitored minute by minute, almost. In reality, what Richardson is trying to do in this extremely long section is demonstrate that the two religions, cleansed of competitiveness and misunderstanding, can co-exist in perfect harmony and mutual respect. The fifth instalment ends with Grandison’s definitive return to England after he has accepted the fact that religion stands in the way of his marriage with Clementina. The last two instalments will describe, with the usual smooth, unhurried pace, the rapprochement of the two paragons of virtue. The last quarter of the novel is characterized by an even more sublime atmosphere, with Grandison again appearing as being sent from heaven to help his fellow-creatures solve their often prickly problems, and, in general, to do good, and, above all, exercise self-control. He is usually referred to as ‘Chevalier’, which is often used as a synonym or alternative for ‘Christ’ in the literature of apologetics. A similar aura of sanctity is extended to Harriet and Clementina, who become spiritual sisters. The reader baulks at the continuation of the novel after the sumptuous wedding of Grandison and Harriet, grumbling to himself that a whole volume could well be done away with. Instead, he is forced to wade through the account of the couple’s married bliss, a repetition of the second volume of Pamela. A final twist is provided by unfortunate, neurotic Clementina’s unexpected arrival in England, where everyone will fall over themselves trying to cure her.

43 According to canon law, however, an interconfessional marriage was possible. 44 None of the episodes set in Italy contain a single word in Italian. However, the fourteen-year-old orphan, Emily, the daughter of a man from Livorno, does recite Filicaja’s fine sonnet, ‘Sopra la Divina Provvidenza’ [‘On Divine Providence’], in the original, and gives a prose translation.

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§ 121. Fielding* I: Richardson parodied The much-cited 1737 Licensing Act, the new law on the censorship of theatrical activities decided by the Prime Minister, Robert Walpole, in *

The Works of Henry Fielding, ed. W. E. Henley, 16 vols, last reprinted New York 1966, is currently being replaced by the Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding, ed. M. Battestin et al., Oxford 1998–. Among the numerous Italian editions, see Shamela, ed. G. Fink, Venezia 1997, with a lengthy introduction containing references to all of the novels. Life. W. L. Cross, The History of Henry Fielding, 2 vols, New Haven, CT 1918; E. Jenkins, Henry Fielding, London 1947; F. H. Dudden, Henry Fielding: His Life, Works and Times, 2 vols, Oxford 1952; P. Rogers, Henry Fielding: A Biography, London 1979; M. C. Battestin and R. R. Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life, London 1989; D. Thomas, Henry Fielding, London 1990; H. Pagliaro, Henry Fielding: A Literary Life, Houndmills 1998; R. Paulson, The Life of Henry Fielding: A Critical Biography, Malden, MA 2000; J. A. Downie, A Political Biography of Henry Fielding, London 2009. Criticism. A. Digeon, The Novels of Fielding, London 1925; W. R. Irwin, The Making of ‘Jonathan Wild’, New York 1941; M. C. Battestin, The Moral Basis of Fielding’s Art: A Study of ‘Joseph Andrews’, Middletown, CT 1959, 1975, also editor of A Henry Fielding Companion, Westport, CT and London 2000; W. Empson, ‘Tom Jones’, in The Kenyon Review, XX (1958), 217–49, reprinted in Paulson 1962, quoted below, 123–45, from which quotations are taken; Fielding: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. R. Paulson, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1962; I. Ehrenpreis, Fielding: ‘Tom Jones’, London 1964; A. Wright, Henry Fielding: Mask and Feast, London and Berkeley, CA 1965; R. Alter, Fielding and the Nature of the Novel, Cambridge, MA 1966; G. W. Hatfield, Henry Fielding and the Language of Irony, Chicago, IL 1968; CRHE, ed. R. Paulson and T. Lockwood, London 1969 and 2002; C. Rawson, Henry Fielding and the Augustan Ideal Under Stress, London 1972, also editor of The Cambridge Companion to Henry Fielding, Cambridge 2007; M. Billi, Strutture narrative nel romanzo di Henry Fielding, Milano 1974; B. Harrison, Henry Fielding’s ‘Tom Jones’: The Novelist as Moral Philosopher, London 1975; J. P. Hunter, Occasional Form: Henry Fielding and the Chain of Circumstances, Baltimore, MD 1975; H. Bartschi, The Doing and Undoing of Fiction: A Study of ‘Joseph Andrews’, Bern 1983; S. Faiola Neri, Henry Fielding, ‘Amelia’, Pisa 1983; T. R. Cleary, Henry Fielding, Political Writer, Waterloo, ON 1984; Henry Fielding: Justice Observed, ed. K. G. Simpson, London 1985; S. Varey, Henry Fielding, Cambridge 1986; P. Lewis, Fielding’s Burlesque Drama, Edinburgh 1987; R. D. Hume, Henry Fielding and the London Theatre, 1728–1737, Oxford 1988; A. J. Smallwood, Fielding and the Woman Question, New York 1989; I. Bell, Henry Fielding: Authorship and Authority, London and New York 1994; J. Uglow, Henry Fielding, Plymouth 1995; Henry Fielding (1707– 1754): Novelist, Playwright, Journalist, Magistrate: A Double Anniversary Tribute, ed. C. Rawson, Newark, DE 2008; H. Power, Epic into Novel: Henry Fielding, Scriblerian Satire, and the Consumption of Classical Literature, Oxford 2015.

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answer to the repeated instances of defamation to which he thought he was being subjected,1 was, according to some, an act of providence that transformed a ‘middling’ playwright into not just a first-rate novelist, but, at least until the end of the nineteenth century, the ‘father of the English novel’. William Empson, and others after him who were of this opinion,2 failed to take into account the opposite theory, expressed by, for example, George Bernard Shaw, according to which if Henry Fielding (1707–1754) had continued as a playwright he would have carved out for himself an important niche in the history of English drama, since, judging only by the plays he wrote before the ban, he is second only to Shakespeare (a much disputed opinion). These theatrical works number twenty-five, a great many considering the short time in which they were written. His first play was performed at the Drury Lane Theatre in 1728, when Fielding was only twenty-one. Fielding, like Joyce, makes great use of autobiographical materials. Born in an aristocratic family that boasted among its illustrious forebears bishops, judges, civil servants and army officers, but had since come down in the world, he went to Eton where he distinguished himself in the study of Greek and Latin. When he was only nine, his mother died;3 in later years he admitted to playing ‘indecent games’ with his sisters, sparking off a search by critics, particularly modern ones, for references to incest in the novels.4 When he was eighteen he became infatuated with a cousin, whom he thought of kidnapping and marrying. His family forbade all further contact with her. In 1724 his tall, sturdy figure was often 1

2 3

4

To be more precise, the law regulated dramatic activities, and authorized only two theatres, those that had been given the royal patent at the Restoration; it also introduced the pre-emptive censorship of texts. One of Fielding’s most daring plays, The Grub Street Opera (1731, never staged, and perhaps banned) was centred on a corrupt butler who dominates an entire family. The dual allusion to the royal family and the Prime Minister did not go unnoticed. Cf. Empson in Paulson 1962, 136, 137. When Fielding’s mother died, his father, an army general, married an Italian Catholic, whose name was deformed into Anna Rapha. She bore him a number of children, and then died, leaving him, once again, a widower, at which he up and married for the third time. Fink 1997, 63.

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to be seen in London, where he became proverbial for his love of wine and women. Immediately after the performance of this first play, he decided, to the surprise of all, to leave England for Leiden, where, for eighteen months, he studied, not medicine, like many of his fellow-countrymen, but literature.5 Fielding’s work for the theatre – forgotten, unperformed, and only recently the object of a timid revival – was of fundamental importance for the future novelist, constituting, as it were, his workshop. For this reason, it calls for a rapid panoramic overview. The elements of autobiography had to be adjusted to the fashions and conventions of the 1730s. Besides the usual five-act ‘comedy of manners’ revolving around plots reminiscent of Congreve and Steele, Fielding applied himself to experimental forms such as farces, parodies, ballad operas, and burlesques in the manner of the now distant Rehearsal by Buckingham and others; that is, metatheatrical plays of which the subject is the staging of another play; we therefore have characters who play the part of actors and a dazzling cross-fire of voices on and off stage.6 The Temple Beau (1730), like others, hinges on the difficult relationship between parents and children – an old subject of Chapman’s; first the older generation is proved to be right, then the younger, whose right to self-determination is condoned. In The Lottery (1731) a lady wins a lottery and is immediately surrounded by a crowd of suitors who desist only when they discover the winning ticket is fraudulent. Other plays lustily invite husbands to satisfy their wives, or present coy maidens besieged by lecherous Lotharios. If we add to The Rehearsal other sources of inspiration, like Molière in two cases, then it is clear that from the very beginning of his literary career Fielding felt at home with parody, provocation and 5

In order to be admitted to the legal profession after 1740, Fielding falsified a certificate of attendance (for twelve years) at the Faculty of Law in Leiden. That he studied law remained an erroneous piece of information given in many presentations. 6 In The Author’s Farce (1730), which ends with an unconvincing leap into the realm of the fantastic, a penniless playwright is the director of a puppet show. Tom Thumb (1731, revised, expanded, and re-titled the following year, a parody of the heroic genre embellished by numerous incongruous images) is the Italian Pollicino, who ends up being eaten by a cow. Pasquin (1736) presents the rehearsal of both a comedy and a tragedy, while the wildly original Historical Register for 1736 (1737) contains four ‘plays within a play’.

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ridicule. Once he formally abandoned the theatre, he took up journalism and continued to satirize the manners of the day and to fight his political and literary enemies in various anti-Whig and anti-Jacobite papers, signing his articles with a pseudonym. 2. Fielding’s novels began appearing in the early 1740s, and these too present the distinguishing marks of ‘literature about literature’; they are based, that is, on earlier literary texts. Like Johnson, he updated a satire by Juvenal, almost as if to render himself immune to the lure of young love. He followed this up with a journey to the underworld reminiscent of Lucian.7 In Joseph Andrews he imitated Cervantes and said so, but also added elements from Scarron, Marivaux and Lesage. Tom Jones grew out of a seed from Heliodorus, Amelia is a remake of Clarissa. If a little downstream from Fielding you find Smollett, look upstream and you see, above all, Richardson. But the before and after are not linked: Smollett writes a completely different kind of novel to Richardson. The latter follows Fielding like his shadow, whose work is an ‘answer in progress’ to the author of Pamela and Clarissa, not to mention Grandison. It might be classified a classic case of ‘anxiety of influence’ or ‘outline mania’; and, in fact, Fielding mauled Pamela but acknowledged the merits of Clarissa. The first two of the three novels that make up Fielding’s canon were explicitly reworkings plus variations of Richardson. Yet, in the end, Fielding gave Richardson the recognition he deserved in Amelia, which is, after all, a tribute to the novel of sensibility. The conflict between them is also one of form: in the preface to Joseph Andrews (and even more transparently in the preface to his sister Sarah’s novel, David Simple), Fielding formulated an aesthetic of prose narrative that was to be inherited, unchanged, by Joyce: simplifying somewhat, one might say that the lowering of the epic to the level of the comic lies, along with other elements, at the heart of Ulysses. Fielding underlines the substantial difference between the two Homeric poems: the Iliad is unitary, while the Odyssey is a series of actions that tend, all together, towards a great conclusion. It could be easily foreseen that Fielding, who was preparing himself for the task of writing Tom Jones, should point out

7

A Journey from This World to the Next (1743).

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that his sister’s novel was ‘a series of separate, independent episodes, tending towards a single conclusion’. This aesthetics was first used in Joseph Andrews, in which the two Quixotic protagonists move towards their nostos continually subjected to acts of vindictive sabotage by a femme fatale (Fielding adds the myth of Telemachus, here harried not by Poseidon but by a vengeful Venus). The ‘end’ of the novel is thus defined: the unmasking of affectation. In narratological terms, Richardson knows less about his characters and therefore invents a correspondence in letters; Fielding is an omniscient narrator. The irreconcilable difference between the two on a conceptual plane concerns the meaning of ‘virtue’ and the role of sexuality in human affairs. Fielding’s novels express the conviction that sex before marriage or outside of marriage, and indeed sex in general, is no sin, or, if a sin, is condoned as long as it is accompanied by sincerity, generosity and, most importantly, charity in the Christian sense. Fielding frees sex of its Puritan chains, with the result that virtue is no longer equivalent to exterior respectability. Yet he is careful not to demolish the double standard, according to which impurity in women is to be condemned, while in men it meets with understanding. 3. There is now no doubt that Shamela (1741), rather than one of the many parodies of Pamela, published either anonymously or under the name of some obscure inhabitant of Grub Street, is indeed by Fielding, though he never ackowledged it. The stroke of genius lies in passing off this poisonous little tale for a series of letters that one clergyman asks a fellowpriest8 to read, and serving it up to gullible readers as the true story of the maidservant, Pamela, while claiming that Richardson’s version is counterfeit. In short, it is what nowadays might be called a literary scoop. Before arriving at the heart of the matter, the reader must make his way through various barriers and obstructions constituted by the kind of battles of wit and allusions that were the prerogative of the Scriblerians. Shamela is, in fact, the last fruit of the season of that fraternity of wits. The objective is to place in a ‘right and true light’ the wiles of Pamela, whose real name was 8

Behind the name of Conny Keyber are Colley Cibber, playwright and actor (§ 76.3 n. 26), and the Cambridge librarian, Conyers Middleton. Both made conspicuous sums of money out of worthless plays. Cibber also backed the Licensing Act.

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‘Shamela’ (a pithy union of ‘shame’ and ‘sham’). To put it bluntly, Shamela had been the mistress of the Reverend Williams of Richardson’s novel. The two reverends of Shamela agree that, as written by Richardson, Pamela is a morally harmful book that should not be mentioned in sermons or placed in the hands of innocent maidens. So, all the terms of Richardson’s novel have to be changed, starting with the family history of Shamela, to whom Fielding gives as parents two opportunists with a murky past and grubby present. The letters themselves form a concise, selective exchange from which it emerges that Shamela, called Pamela, is indeed molested by her lecherous, foolish master, but fights him off until she gets him to sign a proposal of marriage, complete with the specification of a generous allowance. The second element of parody is that the letters are not written in the correct, purified, polite style of Pamela but are full of Smollettian howlers and malaproprisms, manglings of words with comical consequences,9 all constituting the idiolect of a semi-literate servant girl aping the style of sophisticated letter-writers and using highfalutin words she does not really understand. Her devoutness is all show, based on Bible readings and leaflets aimed at uplifting the spirit. The letters describe at length the master’s inept attempts to seduce her, and make it clear that the situation is the opposite of the one described in Pamela: here, the master thinks he is the predator, while in fact he is the prey. Richardson is mocked for his instantaneous writing tecnique, when the reader is invited to believe the letter he is reading is being written in the very instant the master is in bed with Shamela, kissing, caressing and cuddling her. There are many similar hilarious cameos, particularly featuring the Reverend Williams and his fixations (tobacco and hare-coursing), his lapses of memory and naïve epigrams. Williams is used by Fielding to enounce his Latitudinarian creed, in the sense that a religious ceremony is not essential for marriage, as long as there is real love between the man and the woman. From the pulpit Williams, instead, extols a religion made up mainly of exteriority, in which brotherly love comes a poor second: faith above good works, says

9

Like ‘pollitricks’ instead of ‘politics’, which associates politics with fraudulent behaviour.

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Williams, the very opposite of what Fielding believes. The game of chess is being won by Shamela, while the master rants, a dog without a bite. Only at the end does he realize he is Shamela’s prisoner. Thus ends the correspondence, with the master tamed and led to the altar, and Shamela radiant at the thought of the life before her – a life of luxury and leisure, while, on his leash, her husband growls his jealousy of the Reverend Williams. 4. Joseph Andrews (1742) is Richardson upside down, written in the form of chiasmus and not of letters, by a self-confident plotmaster who moulds, speeds up, slows down and explains the plot in an unceasing dialogue with ‘the reader’. The pace is leisurely, and suspense seems to be the least of the writer’s worries. His intentions, instead, are that laughter should flow spontaneously; and, indeed some comic situations have become proverbial. Yet, in Joseph Andrews, Fielding shows he is not yet a master of humour and the genre; this is, after all, his first ‘large’ narrative, and is clearly the work of one who still has much to learn. The reference to Richardson works at the beginning and at the end of the novel, but in between, when Fielding has to depend on his own strength and inventiveness, he falters and often fails. Given this, I will attempt to prove that Joseph Andrews, too, is a parody that liaises with its sources, starting with the explicit references to Cervantes. This explains the frequent differences in style, like the loud protases in epic mode, which, true to the oscillatory movement of the mock-heroic, collapse under the weight of their inappropriateness. The novel is set in the symbolic landscape of a wood, through which, on foot or horseback, a curiously assorted mock-heroic threesome makes its way. In this space, in the light of day, and, especially, the dark of night, the trio meets with both rogues and benefactors in a series of encounters halfway between the unexpected and the improbable. This is the space of the forest as in medieval romance; the Canterbury Tales are there, too, with the numerous interpolated stories inserted just for the pleasure of telling a ‘tale’. Basically, Joseph Andrews is a transparent novel, one that makes little use of irony, and distinguishes unmistakably between the bad and the good, between a whole host of hypocritical scoundrels who present themselves as morally upright, and others that are pure and innocent, and, as such, easy prey for the former. The result is that, as in all novels with a hero and heroine like them, Joseph and Fanny come across as too perfect

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and unreal, while the philosophy of generosity is entrusted to the humorous disquisitions of Parson Adams, who expresses the author’s ideas on morals, theology, and even literary criticism. 5. The mainspring of this picaresque story is the lust of two women for Joseph Andrews, a servant at Booby Hall: one of them is the lady of the manor, the other her horrendous lady-in-waiting. When he spurns the advances of Lady Booby, he is dismissed, and leaves the house with the intention of finding his sweetheart, the milkmaid, Fanny. The wandering couple is joined by the local parish priest, Parson Adams, who is heading for London, where he hopes to sell a collection of his sermons (they end up by going round in a circle and never reach London). The famous scene of the postilion echoes the Gospel parable of the good Samaritan: Joseph has been robbed by thieves and lies naked and shivering on the ground; the coach passengers are shocked by his nakedness, and only the postilion has pity on him and throws him his cloak – accompanying this noble gesture with an oath, it must be said. From this point on, benefactors and rogues vie for supremacy in taverns and dingles, with an especially high proportion of the hypocritical. Early on in the novel, Adams formulates a fundamental concept: an unbeliever who does good works is more saved than someone who believes but acts without charity. Joseph is desired by a number of other women, some of them morally good, thus proving the weakness of human beings when it comes to sex. There are some truly memorable scenes in the novel. To give just one example: when Parson Adams finds he is unable to pay the bill at the inn, he knocks on the door of a colleague of his, one Parson Trulliber, who first expatiates on the rituals and precepts of religion, then refuses to help Adams in any way. Trulliber, a man with the belly of a Falstaff, feels more for his pigs than for other human beings. Fortunately, a true Samaritan is at hand, who without having any doctrinal obligation to help a fellow-man, gives Adams the money he needs for the bill. After the surrealistic nocturnal apparition of a group of young men trying to trap birds with lanterns (they are actually sheep thieves), our threesome continues on its journey, and meets a reformed rake, who insists on telling them, at excessive length, and with no regard for the economy of the novel, the story of his life. This episode, however, will be linked to other events in the final pages of the book. Milk-white, buxom Fanny is, like Joseph,

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only more, the object of desire for the opposite sex, and the ‘hunter of men’, whose dogs attack Parson Adams, calms the pack when he sets eyes on her. As in any self-respecting medieval romance, it is Fanny’s cries for help that bring the knights to her aid. The final part of the novel comes full circle, and all of a sudden Fielding remembers he is meant to be writing a parody of Richardson. An unlikely, upstanding Squire Booby, with his wife, Pamela, in tow, arrives at Booby Hall to act as arbiter in the disagreement that has arisen between Lady Booby and Parson Adams over the wedding of our chaste hero and heroine. Booby is talked into subjecting Fanny to one last desperate attempted seduction and rape. The future happiness of the two lovers is further threatened when Fanny is discovered to be the long-lost daughter of the Andrews, and, therefore, Joseph’s sister. Another coup de théâtre reveals that while Fanny is indeed Pamela’s sister, Joseph is a foundling, and none other than the son of Wilson the reformed libertine, and who, the reader will remember, was stolen by gipsies when a child. His identity is proved by the classic birthmark on his chest. 6. The final tumultuous events of the novel are a rich source of information about the relation between the social classes in eighteenth-century England, and about the kind of novel Fielding is writing. Pamela is back, but she stands cautious and tense in the wings: she feels an obligation to take the side of her Aunt Booby against Fanny, and is far from pleased when Fanny is found to be her sister. At this point, it seems that Lady Booby must win the contest, her only adversary being Parson Adams with his message of disinterested charity. Even his shrewish wife is on Lady Booby’s side, since the family is poor and the Lady is rich. So, Fielding shines a light on the plight of the families of the poor, trodden on and blackmailed by the rich and powerful. At the same time, the last-ditch attempt to seduce Fanny by a vacuous fop points to a deeply ingrained custom of ‘virtue under siege’, such as is so strikingly depicted by Richardson. The final touches are given to the portrait of Adams as an honest man, always on the receiving end and, but only on the surface, a loser: he lectures Joseph on the importance of keeping his emotions under control, yet falls into the very fault that Fielding castigates throughout his novels: saying one thing and doing another. In his case, however, the sin is venial: all he does is in fact give way to despair and sorrow when he hears that his favourite son, just a little boy, has been

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drowned (it turns out not to be true, though). The finale brings out the novel’s increasing similarity to the plan of The Canterbury Tales, with the inclusion of sub-stories that have little to do with the main plot or with each other; some of these belong to the genre of the sentimental novel, or even the mock-heroic. The last instance of this technique of extraneous addition is the reading of a long story by Adams’s son (the parson wants to show off in front of the Lady). There is also a quite obvious allusion to Chaucer’s ‘Miller’s Tale’ when, on the last night of ‘errors’, the fop thinks he is in Fanny’s bedroom, while in fact he is about to embrace the shrewish governess, whose cries wake Adams and bring him to the rescue. The parson thrashes the fop and then ends up by mistake in Fanny’s room, giving Joseph an early morning cause for anxiety. § 122. Fielding II: ‘Jonathan Wild’ Loosely based on the career of the famous highwayman, blackmailer and receiver of stolen goods sent to the gallows in 1725, Jonathan Wild (1743) is composed of four books of about sixty short chapters. The brevity of the constituent parts is an asset, and the final result is a minor masterpiece, enriched by several, not many, lethal asides, and by two chapters of parody of stage dialogue featuring Wild and his wife, Laetitia, who are bored, bickering, and, metaphorically come to blows, and other inmates of Newgate prison. Fielding is like Swift at his best as he engages in all kinds of stylistic acrobatics: he pretends to be an impartial narrator who is left unperturbed by the scandalous skulduggery of the criminal, Wild, while the opposite is true. Wild’s exploits are scrutinized as examples of intelligence and alertness, an exercise in amoral logic. The risk is that the author will be seen as conniving with a scoundrel, as happened with Gay and Defoe.10 Wild is Moll Flanders on a much higher level of amorality. He starts life with an innate predisposition to crime; his violations of law and morality run parallel with those of the great men of history, whose

10

The difference between Defoe’s Wild and that of Fielding is that the former is a carefully documented, detached biography, while the latter is an imaginative exploration of character and theme.

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empires and laurels were founded on felony. Wild himself is ‘great’, just like Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar. One of his traits is a kind of bullying insolence: he demands, and gets, nine tenths of any booty, just like the great conquerors of history. The unspoken agreement between author and reader requires that all value adjectives be inverted. The antidote and counterpart of greatness, in this light, is goodness, which, in Fielding, is never separated from prudence, or caution, since without these adjuncts, goodness becomes complacency and invites disaster. Halfway through we see Wild home in on an old school friend, Heartfree, now a jeweller, and strip him of all he possesses. He fabricates false evidence and has him thrown in prison to await hanging. But even without prudence, goodness sometimes is rewarded. In a part of the novel that should not be considered a lapse into the sentimental, we are shown Mrs Heartfree being wooed by Wild on a ship heading for Holland while her husband in his prison cell nurses suspicions of her infidelity. In the end, it is Wild who swings. § 123. Fielding III: ‘Tom Jones’. A justified sinner Tom Jones (1749) is one of the few English novels of the ‘great tradition’ (with all due respect to Leavis, who excluded it) with which the reading public at large is familiar, and not just in England. The archetypal conflict beween the innocent, fundamentally good hero, and his antagonist, a scheming hypocrite, has a universal and timeless appeal, especially given the happy ending and the triumph of poetic justice after an endless series of adventures that range from the comic to the fantastic, from the farcical to the serious and sentimental. Tom Jones belongs to a category of comical-satirical novels whose deep roots go back, via Cervantes, seventeenth-century French romance, and the Elizabethans, to Greek and Latin comedy (its top branches are Restoration and eighteenth-century theatre). The dialogue between the various characters gives rise to dazzling displays of verbal fencing, in a whole range of cadences, registers and idiolects that Fielding had tried and tested in his work for the stage. The basic storyline has the advantage of being eminently readable. In many cases, a single chapter of Tom Jones is, especially in the opening lines, a self-contained diegetic unit corresponding to a two-dimensional drawing made with bold, clear pencil lines – quite unlike, say, the misty, veiled effects of a Turner,

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and more closely related to the brutally expressive paintings of Hogarth’s Progress series. On a formal plane, Tom Jones is an objective novel, with an omniscient narrator who sits in god-like detachment on his personal Olympus and calmly and coolly moves his characters and events without any personal involvement, though at times he may feign the contrary. He manages and moulds his narrative material, carefully arranged in balanced units, with a self-confidence and skill that Coleridge, for one, admired as soon as he read it, and that has long been judged insuperable. The novel is divided into eighteen books, each containing about fifteen chapters; the chapters, in turn, are arranged in three internal macro-units, with differing settings, pace, forms and design. As I mentioned, Tom Jones boasts a lofty, omniscient, ostentatious narrator, but also an extraordinary intimacy with ‘the reader’ – a fictional, imagined entity – representing the educated readership Fielding was addressing. It is difficult to think of any author more concerned with the reader’s response, and so intent on monitoring his progress through the novel. Fielding is apparently his own first critic and the internal authorial voice, and while he explains and justifies his diegetic strategy, the reader is continually addressed and invoked in order to be advised, corrected, dissuaded, illuminated and exhorted with various formulas that take on the sound of stereotypes, like ‘the reader will not be surprised that …’ or ‘the reader may have expected that …’ or again ‘the reader will be so kind as to remember’, and so on. Fielding pre-empts and guides critical response; he suggests to the reader what he should think, and warns him what not to think. Like a demanding literary critic, or a schoolmaster faced with a class of inattentive pupils, he points us to the exact place, citing book and chapter where a certain statement or event is to be found. At the same time, he is a shrewd, sparing narrator, a masterweaver, who claims the right to decide which threads to carry forward, and which to leave behind, when to move the plot forward and when to rewind to previous events. In order to create suspense, he also reveals only what he wants to share with the reader at that particular point; so he hides both from the reader and the characters important elements that all together will contribute towards the happy ending. 2. Like Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones is a ‘comic epic in prose’, a formula that presupposes the classic interaction with tradition and traditional

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sources. The first of its three macro-units is constructed like a farce, with salacious references to Boccaccio and Chaucer along with other stereotypes belonging to classical and contemporary drama – the familiar stage characters and caricatures, the coups de théâtre, misunderstandings and quarrels. The foundling, Tom Jones, is a spirited young man, highly sexed, but good at heart; Allworthy, the honest senex of the piece, is on the gullible side; his spinster sister is secretly prey to sexual desires beneath an appearance of strict morality; the maids are mischievous; Squire Western is boorish; Sophia is the epitome of purity; Machiavellian Blifil spins his plots in the shadows with the help of his two pedantic tutors, one of whom is incontinent. The second macro-unit, which we might call ‘the two wanderers’, presents a different set of literary reference points: besides a distant parody of Homer, we find the chivalric romance of Ariosto, and vague reflections of Spenser and Sidney, with successive grafts of Cervantes and his numerous offspring. Fielding, supreme artifex, like Ariosto, follows one plot and then stops and goes to another. Consequently the pace is slow. The surrounding countryside is ever-changing; surreal, ghostly visions impinge on the sight, presenting a variety of strange humanity. The third unit concentrates on London, where the literary background is provided by late seventeenthand early eighteenth-century drama, in other words, the comedy of erotic duelling in its natural setting, the aristocracy and upper classes, the world of the rake and the predatory female. The parody turns more and more to raw polemic as the targets draw nearer in time. In other words, Tom Jones is a seducer, and an ironic, inverted demonstration of Richardson’s maxim that ‘virtue will be rewarded’, if only because Tom, so ‘unvirtuous’ in Richardson’s terms, reaps several rewards at the end. The first justification, or extenuating circumstance, to be advanced in favour of Tom is that he is always seduced, rather than a seducer.11 However, the formula I mentioned at the beginning is not sufficient to define the aesthetics of Tom Jones. The eighteen books happen to chime numerically with the number of chapters in Joyce’s Ulysses (which, like Fielding’s novel, is tripartite). The analogy

11

This elementary point was argued by J. M. Murry in a 1956 essay reprinted in Paulson 1962, 89–97. The same will apply to another ‘Jones’, or ‘John’: Byron’s Don Juan.

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is strengthened by the fact that, in the first chapter of the first book, Tom Jones is presented as a feast (the metaphor is re-used), in which the reader is shown a menu with a huge variety of dishes. The basic style of the novel is undoubtedly the register of the official report, aseptic, precise, exhaustive; in a word, ‘reportorial’. And yet, in the long run, this style cloys; it becomes monotonous, scholastic, hackneyed, never sparkling, so that it seems to be parodying itself; it is, in this light, a precise ‘voice’ engaged in experimentation with itself. The first chapters of each of the eighteen books are – many of them, at least – vague and evanescent, suggesting that in order to stick to his agenda (to propound and discuss only theoretical questions), Fielding soon runs out of material and tries desperately to pull rabbits out of his hat. In reality, these chapters might well have been written by Sterne; one of them hinges on the challenges facing an author when he sits down to compose chapters like these. In another, Fielding admits that their contents have nothing to do with the plot itself, and they could be placed anywhere. Fielding is a loquacious author, garrulous, even; he loves gossip and pedantry; he draws descriptions out, enjoys digressions, and, in short, is more like Sterne than one might at first think. The polyphony of Tom Jones derives from the systematic use of quotations from the classics and English writers (Shakespeare in particular) to comment on events and to clash with the comic, or farcical, material of the story itself; examples of this technique are the introductions to each chapter, which deform and distort the literary quotation. 3. A further example of Fielding’s use of polyphony, parody and syncretism is that Tom Jones is a humorous version of Bunyan’s moral fable, starting with the obvious semantic charge of personal and place names: the story begins in Paradise Hall, where Squire Allworthy is seen to live up to his name; ‘Blifil’ sounds like a deformation of ‘evil’, and such indeed is his character; ‘Sophia’, of course, is all wisdom; ‘Tom Jones’ evokes Doubting Thomas and the two Johns – the Baptist, and the beloved disciple; Lady Bellaston is a ‘beautiful stone’, and hard and flinty she really is. Fellamar, embodying ‘fell’ (‘evil’, ‘cruel’) and ‘bitter’, is prey to a cruel, perverse and vindictive passion. These few comments should suffice to show that Tom Jones is an exemplum at the service of a philosophy or morality of disarming simplicity. The fact that he attended no university and did no regular

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course of studies left Fielding ungrounded in philosophy; so, like the fox in Aesop’s fable, all he can do is denigrate and satirize all forms of abstract speculation indiscriminately, condemning it outright in the figures of the two tutors, Thwackum and Square, and forced to embrace a more unsophisticated Weltanschauung. He cannot be considered an intellectual writer of any degree of subtlety; he is, instead, instinctive and pragmatic, as is Joyce, for example, though the Dubliner leaned on external theoretical support provided by, among others, Aquinas, Giordano Bruno and Vico. Fielding’s ‘insensitivity to nuance’ was noted by Empson, whose essay, written in his usual pseudo-sloppy style, attempts to problematize Fielding’s intentions by positing a ‘double irony’. Fielding appears, after all, more primitive than Richardson, because he is blind to psychological nuance: his characters are either good or bad; at most, his good characters might be weak and vulnerable to the demands of the flesh – but always in a very human, normal way. His evil characters are all inhuman, because they are consciously and deliberately greedy and acquisitive; they are deaf to the pleas of their fellowmen, accumulate riches and always want more, and trample on the rights, and sometimes the lives, of others. In Fielding’s list of commandments, as in St Paul, charity comes first; everything else follows. If you cannot resist the temptations of the flesh, then fornicate by all means, but do not deny assistance to those in need. The novel’s revolutionary message (revolutionary for the time) seems to be the depenalization of sexual promiscuity, and sex, before, during, after and outside of marriage. From a psychological point of view, this is all very rough and ready, and far from the more ‘modern’ approach of Richardson, prober of psychic depths and aided in this by the epistolary form, which permits extended, morbid self-analysis. Fielding, instead, confines himself to the exterior of phenomena, and on this basis seems to create his characters. 4. The biblical and evangelical parody is especially evident in the opening phases of the novel. Tom Jones is a Moses saved from the waters of the Nile or a Jonah vomited forth by the whale. He is given refuge by a kind of St Joseph with the same wonder aroused by Mary’s divine gift, without Allworthy’s ever having known – quite literally – the mother of the child. At the moment the good squire is, like all the others, ‘in darkness’, and rails against the sin of sexual incontinence. After a summary, Pilatesque trial, he

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expels the putative mother from the little community. As in the Gospels, mystery reigns as to who Tom Jones’s parents are. Allworthy thinks he has identified them, and these supposed parents, followed later by the supposed son, undertake a symbolic flight into Egypt. Bridget, Allworthy’s sister, strangely averse to marriage, is seen as a good match by the two tutors, attracted by her wealth. Before she dies she gives signs of an inexplicable liking for Tom Jones, after hating him for as long as she has known him. This is the only clue given the reader that Tom is her illegitimate son. Her husband, Captain Blifil, dies in the process of calculating how much longer he will have to wait before inheriting Allworthy’s property. The description of his death is gloomily satirical in its presentation of the sorrows of the wife who has been released from the torture of living with him, of the quarrelling doctors and of the hypocritical headstone at the grave. He who was saved from the waters is he who will take upon himself the sins of all, he who has come to change the law, and who will be systematically summoned to trial by the Sanhedrin of the self-righteous. When he is fourteen, Tom takes the defence of the cowardly gamekeeper; he is found out, punished, and when acquitted, helps the poor underling. Soon Tom finds he is loved by the chaste Sophia Western, from a neighbouring farm, but before this he, an illegitimate foundling, has himself become father to another illegitimate foundling, having got with child Molly Seagram, the gamekeeper’s daughter. Sophia’s father, Squire Western, is the first and only person to make the comment, omnia munda mundis; the satire becomes even more caustic when Tom goes to Molly’s house to comfort her and finds her in bed with the tutor, who justifies his being there by means of perverse casuistry. In the first of his dilemmas, the unexpected discovery of Molly’s promiscuity clears the way for Tom to reach Sophia; he can leave Molly since she does not love him to the exclusion of others, as she had sworn. However, Tom once again loses his head with Molly one day in a wood, and makes love to her, another reminder of the innate, but innocuous weakness of human flesh. The first macro-unit of the novel ends with a confirmation of Sophia’s strength and wisdom, and the parallel weakness of the category of characters we would define as good. Sophia’s aunt convinces her brother that her niece loves Blifil, and Western agrees to encourage the match for economic reasons. Tom, slandered by Blifil,

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is thrown out of the house by his adoptive uncle. Sophia answers Tom’s letter, promising she will marry no one but him. In Sophia’s strenuous opposition to Blifil there is yet another reference to Richardson: Tom is presumed to have moral failings and, above all, is penalized by his class and his financial status; Sophia’s claim to independence brings her in line with Clarissa in her fight against her relatives, who want to force her to marry the despicable Solmes. 5. So far, the movement of the novel has been bi-polar, between the Allworthy residence and Squire Western’s estate. From now on, there are two heros on the run – one expelled as a punishment from his community, the other in voluntary flight from a fate worse than death. Tom and Sophia seek each other in vain. Sophia has left home with her governess, Honour, to avoid marrying Blifil (the wedding preparations are well advanced). She is heading for London, to the home of a friend of her aunt’s. Her flight is carried out with cunning strategems and pardonable deceit. The change of pace is obvious, and this section grinds into motion with excruciating slowness and difficulty. However, the idea of using as a background the already legendary events of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 adds a dimension to the narrative that looks ahead to Walter Scott. Tom is tempted to enlist in the royalist army, and finds himself at an inn where a regiment is billetted. In his naïvety he is tricked and fooled by the soldiers and the landlady. The historical references are, of course, sprinkled with a playful, almost desecrating glitter. The novel has now turned picaresque and accordingly each character enters and leaves the scene several times, and Tom picks up as a fellow-traveller another exile from Paradise Hall, his putative father, Partridge; in this context, along with other strange and wonderful personages, he comes across the hermit known as ‘the man of the hill’. The justification of this long insert is that of showing another exemplum of the reformed rake, of misspent youth followed by repentance; it is also an instance of charity-less misanthropism. The influence of Cervantes comes to the fore when Tom rescues a woman who is about to be raped, and takes her to an inn, where her tempting nudity is modestly covered up. He is like Quixote because the counterpart of his naïvety and nobleness of soul is the ease with which he falls into the traps laid by female beauty. The famous scene of the seduction of Jenny Waters, his supposed mother (like him a

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wanderer in the wood), expressed as the gluttonous consummation of a lavish meal, becomes Chaucerian when two intruders burst in on them as they are consummating their sexual union. At that very moment – the exact middle of the novel, such is Fielding’s extraordinary constructive skill – Sophia arrives at the inn. She is told that Tom is in bed with a woman, and, armed with wisdom, she leaves her muff, a fundamental item in a previous scene of love, together with a scribbled note as a gesture of punishment and challenge. Soon after, Squire Western, too, arrives at the inn, and the wood becomes a maze where the paths of pursued and pursuers criss-cross, the latter arriving always just too late to lay hands on the former. 6. At the tavern, Sophia is mistaken for the lover of Bonnie Prince Charlie, and Tom is more than ever determined to enlist, although the cowardly Partridge tries to dissuade him. Just then, a travelling puppet show passes by (there may be a reference to Jonson here), which serves as a pretext for a paragraph on the theatre’s inadequacy as a means of education. In the meantime, there are growing reports that the Jacobite rebels are at hand, and, consequently, that Catholicism is raising its head. During a gipsy wedding at which they are present, Partridge acts like Sganarelle or the future Leporello, and sizes up a gipsy girl, thus necessitating a trial exemplifying the judicial system of the gipsies. Tom has risen considerably in moral stature, though he is still authorized to have sexual relations with a woman as long as she is willing. This, for Fielding, is no sin, quite unlike stealing, or refusing to help someone in need. This was to be Dickens’ message, too – at least, the part concerning charity. Sex and charity, placed on the scales, balance out, time after time. Near London, Tom finds himself giving Partridge a lesson in morality, when he slips two guineas to an apprentice thief, who, caught in the act and disarmed, is unable to feed his children. 7. In London, Tom sets about looking for Sophia, and, passing through various filters and diaphragms, ends up in the net of Lady Bellaston. Once again, he gives proof of a weakness that is paradoxically pathological: he is looking for his ‘angel’ but is tempted by a sexual ‘devil’ (Bellaston is actually called ‘devil’ in the text), thus tumbling into yet another dilemma. Lady Bellaston not only spreads scandal about Tom, but arranges for Sophia to be raped by Fellamar. In the meantime, in a number of secondary and parallel actions, Tom is engaged in resolving various tricky situations resulting

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from rape and other illicit sexual relations (he is better at solving other people’s problems than his own). He also receives a bizarre proposal of marriage, precisely because, as a matter of principle, he must always be tempted, and Fielding enjoys seeing him in a tangle of trouble. In this way his weakness is underlined, and the possibility fades that one day he might become a faithful husband. In one of his usual nobilitating, and at same time, humorous similes, Fielding applies to him the firm decision of Macbeth. In the finale he returns to the parody of Richardson in a series of letters containing Tom’s proposal of marriage to Lady Bellaston in the certain knowledge that she will refuse him because of their class difference; another letter, full of grammatical howlers and dialect words, written by the governess, Honour, anticipates Smollett’s Humphry Clinker. The pace picks up when Tom kills a trouble-seeker in a duel without meaning to. He is put in prison, and Sophia wearies of it all. The happy ending gleams on the horizon when it turns out that the ‘dead’ man is not really dead. The landlady of an inn is instrumental in Tom’s salvation, as is Jenny Waters, his supposed mother, who re-appears as a witness that Tom did not cause the duel. More importantly, she reveals the true identities of Tom’s parents. Light is thrown on Blifil’s machinations, and Allworthy is able to piece together the events of the past. Bliful is unmasked, Bridget is redeemed and absolved in extremis, the Westerns make peace. That Blifil insists on marrying a rich Methodist widow is far from complimentary to the new movement that proclaimed itself the regenerator of contemporary religion.12 As in every self-respecting comedy or fable, all the other characters match up in foreseeable symmetrical unions, as well as a couple of cockeyed ones. Tom achieves marital chastity. Or does he? § 124. Fielding IV: ‘Amelia’ There are more clear, decisive differences between Tom Jones and Amelia (1752), Fielding’s next and last novel, than between Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews. Amelia is not a peripatetic picaresque, nor a comic

12

Thackeray observed that Hogarth, too, considered the Methodists to be hypocrites and tricksters. The Reverend Williams of Pamela becomes a Methodist in Shamela.

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novel enriched with humour and farce. Set in London, it tells the story of a married couple rather than of star-crossed lovers. It aims to follow ‘truth’, and has none of the fantastical elements of Tom Jones. There is no trace of Cervantes in it, and it does not take issue, overtly or covertly, with Richardson. Indeed, if anything, it appears to be, for once, positively influenced by him. Fielding felt that in Tom Jones he had written a fastmoving, gloriously superficial novel; now, with the next one, he meant to dig deep.13 So he keeps to a minimum his usual traits – his tricks and artifices of style and plot, his humorous asides and erudite tags, the authorial interventions of an omniscient narrator. All is reduced, and what is left is camouflaged. Amelia is usually defined as a ‘sentimental novel’, but it would be more accurate to speak of it as a forerunner of the ‘shabby-genteel’, as in Thackeray’s less important novels, featuring the monotonous routine of the lower-middle class, and whose protagonists are characters perfectly represented by the retired army captain, Booth: they are educated, from good stock, not wicked, but sluggish to virtue, weak and lazy. Above all, they walk around in a perennial state of lethargy, not to say hypnosis.14 In the figure of Captain Booth, Fielding steals a march on Hardy with this exorcism of a private obsession transformed by his art into an attentive study and analysis of the fragility and fickleness of human resolutions and moods, with special reference to his character’s tendency to stumble into adultery. Therein lies the difference. Tom Jones’s lust is a benign adolescent itch, only slightly troublesome and easily cured. In Amelia, the atmosphere is darker, as if forecasting the naturalist novel, with all the symptoms of a real sickness. Tom is a young man of twenty, Booth is a mature married man, from whom a greater sense of responsibility is to be expected. His behaviour, with the repeated and inappropriate proposals made to his wife, is scandalous. The equanimous approbation extended to Tom is, in Booth’s case, impossible: the man is an abject villain. Yet

13 14

Johnson’s quip is famous: Richardson knew how a clock was made, while Fielding could tell the time by looking at its face. Thackeray, predictably, preferred Captain Booth to Tom Jones, in terms of both the characters and the novels.

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Fielding in the end turns a blind eye and redeems him. In fact, he seems to take a masochistic delight in pushing further apart the gender poles: men are always weak, and women, or that particular woman, is always a paragon of virtue. Fielding also subjects the woman in Amelia to temptation, and leads her almost to breaking point so that, in the end, she shines more clearly forth as a Penelope or a Griselda. As a consequence, once Booth has been cured of his attacks of eroticism, he becomes jealous of his wife who has always preserved her chastity. It is no coincidence that Amelia Booth has been seen as the forebear of Thackeray’s Amelia Sedley – pale, grieving, patient, insipid Amelia Sedley, an iconic figure for Victorian England, with a beauty that is demure, not loud, has no need of make-up, and is all the more appreciated if accompanied by a scar on the nose, and clothed in rags. Miss Matthews, on the other hand, is the classic femme fatale; as a character she is unconvincing, but she succeeds in bewitching the sleep-walking protagonist. Amelia contains scenes of burning-hot passion that are not to be found in any other of Fielding’s novels, but even these are few and far between. The narrative pace is set by the everyday routine of a London couple in economic straits, with the repeated assurance that all is well except for something that must be told, and saving the risk that the reader might die of boredom, something not unknown in the case of novels that present a mimesis of pure, undiluted normality. 2. Amelia is continually interrupted by flashbacks recounted by one or other of the characters in various chapters, so that we have a number of ‘novels within a novel’, justified by a wide range of more or less plausible pretexts. It is a step backwards for a master of the art like Fielding to have Booth and his old flame, Miss Matthews, tell the stories of their lives so far (they have both ended up in prison independently, and have recognized one another). When the colourful account of Booth’s military career, engagement and marriage comes to an end (it lasts several nights), the curtain is drawn discreetly, and the reader is induced to believe that the two former lovers are now engaged in renewing their acquaintance in a more physical manner. After this night of custodial passion, Amelia appears and reclaims her husband, at which Booth and Miss Matthews part company. Matthews will crop up again here and there in the course

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of the novel, but, fortunately for Booth, her appearances last as long as the sudden glow of a fire-fly. It may well be thought that the potential of Booth’s erotic obsession is not sufficiently exploited by Fielding, and that it could have become a first case of sexual slavery and the fatal phantasm of female lust. After the night of love, and its appendix, which make up a good third of the total, the novel drags on, with the random addition of a few tedious anecdotes. A host of secondary characters are introduced, and invited to tell their stories, which are often tear-jerking, moving, not to say harrowing accounts of death, sorrow and disaster. Booth’s desire for Miss Matthews being temporarily quelled, a libidinous colonel tries to help him avoid debtors’ prison by asking him free access to his wife, Amelia. The obscene proposal of debt-ridden Booth is that she should agree to ‘act the wife’15 with the colonel for a certain period. But the tempters are many and the naïve, superficial Booth becomes suspicious and jealous: in his veins flows the blood of Othello for an Amelia who is as pure as Desdemona. A sergeant who loves her madly from a distance with a respectful, Platonic love has a dream: he is about to kill the colonel as he attempts to rape Amelia; he takes out his sword but, instead of the colonel, kills his own wife. When he awakes from his dream, he actually sees her in a sea of blood, which turns out to be cherry brandy she has spilt on the bed. This is one of those surreal, oneiric episodes that lift the book out of its monotonous routine. While Fielding does not refer to Booth as a St Joseph, he does not brand him a husband ‘guilty of premeditated inconstancy’ either. Booth falls into Miss Matthew’s snare once again at the masked ball; Amelia has promised to be here too, but sends, instead, her ‘double’. When Booth in a moment of madness loses all he has at the gaming table, Amelia has already become a Victorian ‘angel in the house’, who accepts and carries on, while Booth crumbles, broods on his folly and almost adds worse to bad by suggesting his wife sell her body to pay his gambling debts. All the ingredients of tragedy are there, only a few pages from the end. As if by magic, Fielding bends the plot towards a happy 15

This expedient is also found in Fielding’s play, The Modern Husband (1732).

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ending, not before reminding the reader of Amelia’s heroic sacrifice in taking every single things she possesses to the pawnshop. 3. Fielding studied law at the Middle Temple between 1737 and 1740. In 1739 he founded the thrice-weekly Champion, which proposed to tell the stinging truth on the facts of the day, as preannounced in his chosen pen-name, Hercules Vinegar. This was followed by other, less fortunate journalistic experiments, by now decidely pro-monarchy. His first wife, Charlotte Cradock, died prematurely in 1744 (Fielding always claimed that this much-loved spouse was mirrored in both Sophia Western and Amelia Booth), and three years later he married her maid, who was already pregnant with his child. He wrote his two principal novels while engaged, unpaid, as London’s chief magistrate. In this role he was extremely scrupulous; he practically created the police force in England, helped reform the criminal law, and published a pamphlet on how to curb delinquency (1751) which expresses a deeply conservative and intolerant point of view, far different from the liberal voice that rings out in his other works. A Voyage to Lisbon was published in 1755 in two different versions, of which the second omits all references to living people, but contains some additional material. It might be seen as a faint variation on his parodies of Richardson: rather like the letters that make up Richardson’s novels, A Voyage to Lisbon consists of a day-to-day and month-to-month diary that details the exasperating preparations for a sea-journey, phase by phase. It is true that it is not a collection of letters, but let us not forget that Pamela too becomes a diary, and that we are faced with the same ‘double I’, the one that acts, and the one that writes, and that this diversity is reflected in the style of both diaries and letters. The distinguishing mark of this very popular diary is the deliberate mixing and mingling of the high and the low: Fielding is not silent on certain prosaic realities of everyday life, like the tooth-ache and the correct treatment for gout. During a learned discussion of Plato’s political philosophy, the company is thrown into a tizzy by the news that a kitten has fallen into the sea and risked drowning. At the same time, each single entry is a kind of newspaper article, more or less the length and depth of a leader or feature. Lisbon itself, where Fielding died and is buried, is seen only in the distance from the deck of the ship.

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§ 125. Smollett* I: Transplant and growth of the English picaresque The last to be born of the five principal novelists of the late eighteenth century, Tobias Smollett (1721–1771), a doctor and a true-blooded Scot (hence the medical element in my title), was a restless, wandering spirit: he spent three years of his life in the Caribbean, travelled the length and breadth of Europe, and, at the age of fifty, went to Livorno where he hoped to find relief for his consumption, only to die after not more than two years. He is buried there in the British Cemetery. Smollett faced the problem of finding his own space and identity as a novelist, and indeed succeeded in creating a type of narrative that was different to Richardson’s sentimental epistolary novels, Fielding’s British version of the Quixotic picaresque, and, after 1767, the eccentric digressiveness of Sterne. His search for originality was tenacious and determined, and was accompanied by an awareness of 16

*

Works, ed. G. Saintsbury, 12 vols, London 1895; in 11 vols, Oxford 1925–1926, both now replaced by The Works of Tobias Smollett, ed. A. Pettit et al., Athens, GA 1989–. Letters, ed. E. S. Noyes, Cambridge, MA 1926, 1969, and, ed. L. M. Knapp, Oxford 1970. H. S. Buck, A Study in Smollett, New Haven, CT 1925; C. E. Jones, Smollett Studies, Los Angeles 1942; L. L. Martz, The Later Career of Tobias Smollett, New Haven, CT 1942; G. M. Kahrl, Tobias Smollett, Traveler-Novelist, Chicago, IL 1945; F. W. Boege, Smollett’s Reputation as a Novelist, Princeton, NJ 1947; L. M. Knapp, Tobias Smollett: Doctor of Men and Manners, Princeton, NJ 1949, 1963; L. Brander, Tobias Smollett, London 1951; M. A. Goldberg, Smollett and the Scottish School: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Thought, New Mexico 1959; R. Alter, Rogue’s Progress: Studies in the Picaresque Novel, Cambridge, MA 1964; R. Giddings, The Tradition of Smollett, London 1967, and Tobias Smollett, London 1995; R. D. Spector, Tobias George Smollett, New York 1968, Boston, MA 1989, and Smollett’s Women: A Study in an Eighteenth Century Masculine Sensibility, Westport, CT and London 1994; A. Cozza, Tobias Smollett, Bari 1970; Tobias Smollett: Bicentennial Essays, ed. G. S. Rousseau and P.-G- Boucé, New York 1971 (Boucé is also the author of The Novels of Tobias Smollett, Eng. trans., London 1976); D. Grant, A Study in Style, Manchester 1977; A. Bold, Smollett: Author of the First Distinction, London 1982; G. S. Rousseau, Tobias Smollett: Essays of Two Decades, Edinburgh 1982; CRHE, ed. L. Kelly, London 1987; J. G. Basker, Tobias Smollett Critic and Journalist, Newark, DE 1988; A. Douglas, Uneasy Sensations: Smollett and the Body, Chicago, IL and London 1995; J. C. Beasley, Tobias Smollett: Novelist, Athens, GA 1998; J. Lewis, Tobias Smollett, London 2003; Tobias Smollett: Scotland’s First Novelist, ed. O. M. Brack, Newark, DE 2007; R. J. Jones, Tobias Smollett in the Enlightenment, Lewisburg, PA 2011.

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the subtlest of nuances and differentiations in the aesthetics and practical handling of the novel form. He was a far from easy character: quarrelsome, stubborn, he made enemies of his rivals, and was slow to forgive, not only when his qualities were not acknowledged, but also, and especially, when he was plagiarized; and when others accused him in turn of copying from his contemporaries, and failed to recognize his innovative qualities, he foamed at the mouth. In the final analysis, his actual achievements were inferior to the effort he invested, at least up to his penultimate or ultimate work. Orwell, initially an admirer of Smollett, was embarking on no easy task when he set about arguing that he was ‘Scotland’s best novelist’,1 and, by 1944, admitted that his novels were ‘no longer worth reading’, and that included his masterpiece, Humphry Clinker. Orwell maintained that Smollett’s distinguishing trait was a healthy indifference to morality, or, rather, moralizing, an indifference which constituted a pre-emptive opposition to the future aesthetics of the nineteenth century. Smollett’s first two heroes, Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle, whose scale of values is extremely contradictory and confused, are, at bottom, motivated by purely personal interest. In Smollett’s day, Orwell went on, one could say quite openly things that, fifty years later, would be censured by hypocrisy; in short, his realism was equivalent to an absence of restraint. Reticence on sexual matters was already dying out, and, for Orwell, Fielding was nothing but a prude. The short prefaces to Smollett’s first two novels appear to give the lie to Orwell: the novelist declares that he agrees with Fielding on the social responsibility of the novel – to castigate vice – which essentially means holding affectation and dishonesty up to ridicule and reprobation. Like Fielding, Smollett usually sends into the world an honest man that loses his innocence, but only because society is brutal, sordid and rotten. In this kind of environment, it is a case of ‘God helps those who help themselves’, hence a never-ending series of cruel pranks, practical jokes, hoaxes and double-dealing against simpletons and fools by all kinds of savvy sharpers. Smollett is credited with two other innovations: the humorous gallery of national characteristics that the English attributed to the Scots, Welsh and

1

OCE, vol. III, 282–6.

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Irish; and the very first examples of an entirely new breed of characters, mainly sea-dogs. A third innovation of his figures only in Humphry Clinker: dialectal deformations that give rise to scurrilous double-entendres, a linguistic technique that will be taken up by Dickens, and, to a lesser extent, by Joyce. One of the great sources of narrative material for Smollett was his own life, and the first two novels were enormously successful because they managed to convey and objectify personal experience that smacked of real life in all its harshness. Of these first novels, one is a repeat of the other, a different version of the same story. Later, once he had run out of personal memories and was obliged to invent, he wrote two more major works that are even less convincing; in fact they might be considered literary flops. With his last novel, he seems to regain his powers and take flight, in a format that was quite new, and that brought forth the most likeable of his works. 2. It often seems a necessary condition that a father should be a ne’erdo-well for his children to be fired by ambition and the determination to get on in the world. So it was with Smollett, who lost, at a very young age, a father that, nowadays, would be called a ‘loser’. His novels, in fact, are full of fathers lost and found again, and real, as opposed to step- or supposed fathers discovered in a happy ending. He was brought up by his grandfather, a wealthy landowner and high court judge of Whig tendencies who had favoured the union of the crowns in 1707. He studied medicine at Glasgow University but was well-read and talented in various branches of knowledge, particularly Latin and Greek. In line with an established practice of his fellow-Scots, at the age of eighteen he came to London full of literary ambition. He brought with him the manuscript of The Regicide, a tragedy he had written, based on the account of the historian Buchanan, on the murder of James I of Scotland in 1437. Manuscript it remained: he found no publisher interested in printing it, or theatre manager hardy enough to stage it. Smollett never forgot this affront to his genius, and nursed the burning grudge for the rest of his life. With the qualifications deriving from his career as a student in medicine, he found a position as ship’s doctor on board a warship sailing to take part in the siege of Cartagena, on the coast of what is today Colombia. The English fleet was defeated, but Smollett stayed on in the Caribbean, and became engaged to a Jamaican heiress, Nancy Lascelles. In 1744 he left the Antilles, returned to London and set

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up as a doctor. Patients were scarce, so he tried his fortune on the literary scene with satirical verses redolent of Scriblerian polemic, expressing his support for the Jacobite cause (‘The Tears of Scotland’ mourned the defeat of the Jacobites at the battle of Culloden in 1745). Still smarting from the rejection of The Regicide, he wrote a poem attacking Lord Lyttelton, the man he held responsible for blocking it; this was a parody of an elegy written on the death of the lord’s wife. He then threw himself, body and soul, into writing and publishing, in the space of three years, two lengthy novels (as I mentioned, one almost a replica of the other), which in the seamless series of detailed, impartial accounts of events and people are an anticipation of the Victorian pot-boiler. The sixty-nine chapters of first-person narrative of Roderick Random (1748) contain much of Smollett’s life up to his return to England from the West Indies, including his engagement to Nancy Lascelles, who joined him later and became his wife. The Scottish hero of this novel, together with his trusty school friend, arrives in London after an adventurous journey through heath and forest, with the usual encounters with unsavoury characters, and spicy scenes at various inns. He then embarks as a ship’s doctor on what turns out to be a very long maritime interlude. He is the typical ingénu, who before reaching full maturity must be temporarily contaminated by the corrupt society that surrounds him; so his back-sliding is not entirely his fault. Fielding was to draw a similar kind of character in Tom Jones (the novel had yet to appear): an extremely physical person, and susceptible to the lure of the senses, he is quick to react when offended, or, indeed, robbed and beaten. But he is always upstanding, and, like Tom, ready to help those in need. Roderick might be considered a Tom Jones ante litteram also because, sexually demanding though less discerning, he falls head over heels in love with Narcissa, though in this case his love is pure. He loses her, and tumbles into the odd trap or two, dazzled by more than one pair of blue eyes into a number of sexual escapades on his road to self-awareness. Fruit of Smollett’s own peculiar genius are all those scenes and settings that are not descriptions of country houses or forests with a literary flavour, and based on the well-worn clichés of romance, and sights and spectacles so often seen during the classic grand tour through France and Italy: in fact, most of the action of Roderick Random takes place on board warships or merchant vessels, with characters never before seen in

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fiction and an unforgiving light thrown on the hell-hole below decks, where the sick lie writhing in indescribable filth. Smollett is often compared to Hogarth for the brutally realistic depiction of life at sea in one case and of ‘slum-city’ in the other; another factor that links the two is the portrayal of a decayed and despicable aristocracy, summed up in the savagely ironic comment: ‘Thank God some trace of virtue was still to be found in the nobility’. Smollett is impassible, deadpan as he composes these satirical portraits and expresses none of the ponderous sarcasm of the moralist. He reminds one of Defoe, though more stylish, and, like Defoe, rattles off the chain of events at often breakneck speed, and uses the labyrinthine library of information he has stored in his mind to back up and give greater credibility to his descriptions.2 The more one reads, the more convinced one is that Smollett in Roderick is neither a humorist nor an expert in dialogue; he is a great raconteur with a masterly grip on a plot that is unwound almost in one breath; quite a tour de force. He is Defoe to the power of two, who alienates his reader after a while with his conventional turns of phrase – carefully constructed, but neutral, sterilized, diplomatic – which coagulate in paragraphs that cry out to be parodied by someone like Joyce.3 Fielding will soon breathe new life into this kind of material. Smollett is most definitely not Defoe when he takes his characters and twists them into figures resembling gargoyles, which Dickens in turn will transform, from an occasional exploit, into a systematic strategy of the grotesque humour that is one of his trade-marks. To take just one example: during a 2

3

Smollett perfects the practice of opening each chapter with something like a newspaper headline: short phrases, sometimes lacking a verb or other parts of speech that summarize the events to be related. The plot creaks somewhat in places, with characters just disappearing, swallowed up and forgotten, though some do re-appear, like the Huguenot pharmacist with the unhappily married daughter, and, especially, the redeemed prostitute, who turns up in Bath as lady in waiting to the immaculate Narcissa. To give only one example: the expression ‘to leave no stone unturned’, which occurs both in Smollett’s novel and in Joyce’s Ulysses: ‘Our greatest living phonetic expert (wild horses shall not drag it from us!) has left no stone unturned’ ( Joyce) and ‘she left no stone unturned to alienate the commodore’s affection for this her innocent child’ (Smollett).

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storm at sea, the crew give way to their instinct, some good, some bad; a carpenter wielding an axe is caught in the act of breaking down the door of the purser’s cabin. Asked for an explanation of his actions, he confesses: ‘I only want to taste the purser’s rum, that’s all, master’. Dickensian satire is anticipated in the figure of the eccentric, slovenly would-be poet, for all the world like Mrs Jellyby.4 On the other hand, the meticulous attention paid to the historical authenticity of the facts narrated clashes with the romantic, or even melodramatic superficiality manifested in the treatment of the hero’s emotive dimension. Roderick and Narcissa – that paragon of beauty and virtue – fall in love in record time. Brutally cynical when it comes to detailing circumambient evil, Smollett overdoes the sentimental aspect of his characters: they go from one extreme to another, from deepest despair to the heights of joy, accompanied, in both states, by abundant shedding of tears. This is, evidently, a distant echo of Richardson, because the single, isolated chapter in the first person might be a nod to the author of Pamela, without being an actual parody. 3. Critics are still debating as to which of the first two novels by Smollett is the better. I propend for Roderick Random, as Peregrine Pickle (1751, revised 1758)5 has, it seems to me, two major defects: its style is based on the excessive use of hackneyed metaphors, comparisons and set phrases; above all, it is too long, and in the end, unreadable, stuffed full of minor incidents that have no real narrative function; it is as if Smollett had set his sights on filling a certain number of pages, producing a ragbag of unconnected stories just to reach his target. It is true that the beginning of the book is promising: it sounds fresh and new, as if the author intended to make up for the deficiencies in construction of Roderick Random. But this good impression does not last long: what follows is a text that is elaborate and analytical, but lacklustre and unconvincing. It reads like a kind of satirical comedy, with the two ladies that scheme and manoeuvre their way to a position of complete 4 5

The origin of Uncle Toby’s mania in Sterne is found in a scene in a coffee-house, when a general describes the siege of Namur, and uses the word épaulement, at which the gathered company asks: ‘Pray, what is an épaulement?’ No answer is forthcoming. Several ‘racy’ scenes were omitted as well as a number of comments and attacks against personal enemies.

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control over their respective husbands. Then Commodore Trunnion makes his triumphant appearance on the scene, spouting colourful phrases typical of a seafarer. One can almost sense the presence of Sterne. The wedding of Trunnion and Peregrine’s aunt is memorably described, with the carriage bearing the couple to the church compared to a ship that slips its moorings. This kind of felicitous vignette becomes less frequent as the novel goes on and the plot becomes more packed and breathless. Smollett shows himself to be more than competent in handling his material, but, in the end, the novel is simply too long, with its more than 100 chapters, two of which are the length of the average novella. Told in the third person, set, at first, in a country manor, the novel is a ‘Life and Career’ book: like Sterne’s, but at greater speed, it begins with the parents and an account of the birth of the hero. Peregrine Pickle, unlike Roderick Random, is your typical rapscallion, who, practically as soon as he is born, displays a distinct proclivity for practical jokes and japes. If Roderick anticipated Tom Jones, Peregrine echoes him, although he is more oafish. There is much good nature in him, but also a lack of moral fibre: he swears true love to Emilia, yet hunts far and wide for other prey. He becomes a predatory rake, of the kind we are familiar with in Richardson. He is like Mr B with Pamela, who discovers his sordid designs on her chastity and spurns him. Like Pamela, Emilia holds the winning card, and self-confident Peregrine is forced to swallow his pride and several unsavoury setbacks. However, Smollett is never too vocal in his condemnation of Peregrine: he limits himself to noting the painful punishments meted out on human vanity. Smollett, himself a doctor, has been accused of not providing any acceptable psychological or sociological diagnosis of this disease. All he does is give a case history. In the end, Peregrine’s fate is the same as Roderick’s: redeemed or repentant, he assumes, through marriage, the dignity of responsibility and humility, as in some early Bildungsroman. The attempt at a mixed-genre novel has failed: the Paris section with the appendix in Flanders, peppered with episodes of philandering, and more or less embarrassing scrapes, is a travel diary modified to include visits to museums, descriptions of landscapes, and debates on art and literature. The 120-page chapter containing the memoirs of a high-born lady (probably someone he really knew) might conceivably come across as a parody of Defoe’s Roxana. After endless delays (Peregrine

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participates in the soporific proceedings of a London debating society, in which the weapon of Swiftian satire is wielded against its members, among whom are scientists who have fathered quite impossible projects), our hero ends up in prison and is there subjected, along with the reader, to the seemingly never-ending reminiscences of a fellow-prisoner. 4. The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753) is another ‘career’ novel that, beginning with the birth and infancy of the hero, follows him through his schooling and into the life of crime as a petty cheat, quack doctor and counterfeiter. He is successful in love, low dealings and all kinds of fraud in Vienna, Paris and England, until he is miraculously converted to honesty and good sense. Once again, the ‘medical’ focus is on satyriasis, ‘that venereal appetite which glowed in the constitution of our adventurer, and [which] with all his philosophy and caution [he] could hardly keep within bounds’. This novel, about the same length as the previous ones, and constructed on a merry-go-round of exploits and events, suddenly becomes unsubstantial, fragile, unreal. No longer based on autobiography, but on what the author manages to invent, it immediately turns into a combination of random elements – parodies of passages from the Faerie Queene featuring castles and dungeons where maidens lie in chains, or premonitions of Gothic graveyardism with ghosts and ghouls that try but fail to frighten.6 The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves (1760–1762, the first English serial of any importance) might at first lead one to suspect in Smollett a deplorable tendency to repeat himself; instead, Greaves is a turning point. Gone is the cheat, or the noble, likeable lout, and in his place, a dreamer. He is still ‘our adventurer’, but with a twist, just for variety’s sake. There are premonitions of Chesterton in the scene where a knight, dressed from head to toe in armour, bursts in on the solid, earthy reality of the English countryside, at an inn, where four hearty fellows are having a drink. They obviously do not know what to make of this strange figure who has appeared out of nowhere, miraculously transported from the pages of Don Quixote. Another radical difference is in the length: this is a squib, quite unlike the

6

This is the reason David Punter (in his work quoted in § 142.2 n. 3) sees this as the foundation text of terror fiction.

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seemingly never-ending adventures of Roderick, Peregrine or Fathom. After a promising beginning, Greaves falls off somewhat as a parodic commentary on the Quixotic sub-text. Smollett’s fantasy has by now been ‘unleashed’, only the ironic title forming a tenuous connection with his original genre of the ‘life and adventures’ novel: the Adventures of an Atom (1769) is an account of the crazy, confused, jumbling about of an atom as it passes from one body to another in a long series of metempsychoses, ending up in the pineal gland of an English amanuensis. Formally, it is an episode of ancient Japanese history, though it overlaps into the English history of the previous decade. This piece of nonsense proves that Smollett had been reading Sterne and was now challenging him on his own ground. He was to lose the match, but, to make up for it, he manages to capture a bit of the spirit of Swift in his obvious coprolalic and excremental predilection. § 126. Smollett II: ‘Humphry Clinker’. Turning towards the extravaganza The year 1769 saw the end of a decade that, for Smollett, had been singularly unproductive: disappointed by the limited success of his novels, in a worsening state of health, he now confined himself to the editing of substantial works of literature by others, and acting as a general literary impresario. About twenty years before, in 1748, he had supervised a team of translators that turned out English versions of several landmarks of European literature, like Gil Blas (1748) and Don Quixote (1755), and had even launched and edited the complete works of Voltaire in thirty-six volumes (1761–1769). The Regicide, which had caused him so much tribulation, was published at long last, and he completed a History of England in five volumes in 1765. He started and edited two journals, in which he published his satires and a number of headstrong attacks against important members of the cultural establishment.7 For his pains he was fined, and even served a short prison sentence. Travels through France and Italy (1766), bristling with grotesque and sometimes malevolent annotations dictated by partisan prejudice and by his intolerant, bitter, irritable personality, is the very opposite to the sympathetic, sentimental journey narrated by Sterne, in 7

At the same time he defended his much-abused fellow-Scot, Lord Bute, in the columns of The Briton (1762).

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the course of which Smollett is referred to as ‘Smelfungus’. Given all this, no one could possibly have foreseen Humphry Clinker (1771), written at Montenero, near Livorno, where Smollett, despite his dislike for all things Italian, had gone for the second time, in search of a more suitable climate for his failing health. That this ailing, ageing man, now in the final stages of the tuberculosis that was soon to kill him, could have produced a book that sparkles and shines with such good humour, vitality and verve is quite astonishing.8 Yes, the novel does reflect the author’s obsession with disease and its effects on the body, but, miraculously, Smollett succeeds, with this last, supreme achievement, in exorcising his demon and sends a ruefully optimistic message to the world. In his end is his beginning: with Clinker, Smollett returns to the thing he does best – autobiography disguised as fiction. Like all his novels, Humphry Clinker is a hybrid, and as such follows previous and current models. First of all, it can be considered one of the most sophisticated epistolary novels of the eighteenth century. In fact, it is unique: a satire that mixes good humour with Swift’s saeva indignatio, it chimes with Fielding in praising goodness of heart and turning a blind eye on human frailty (it is the third case of a late seventeenth-century novel whose hero is a foundling or a son that has been lost and is found again); it is a travel diary, and, at the same time, a ‘yarn’; a notebook of ideas, impressions and opinions on the various issues of the day. In Clinker, Smollett abandons the formula of the biography of a single protagonist, traced from childhood to maturity. The time scale of the novel does not exceed eight months. The epistolary plot is constructed on the fragile, and painful, premise of Matthew Bramble’s gout and his various attempts to cure or alleviate it, of which he informs his trusted family doctor, Lewis, in his letters. A second thread concerns his maiden sister Tabitha’s fruitless search for a husband, and the courting of his niece, Lydia, by an actor called Wilson, who is always in her mind, and who appears from time to time, occasionally in disguise to avoid being found out by her uncle and her brother, Jery, both hostile to the relationship. Humphry himself, the eponymous hero, is introduced in medias res, and at first appears a bit of 8

Some of the letters in the Travels, however, are from a Smollett informing his doctor of his health problems.

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a misfit, just another one of Smollett’s ‘originals’, so that the very title of the novel seems specious and misleading (besides, Clinker writes not one single letter). Then – we discover that he is Bramble’s illegitimate son. For the last time in his life, Smollett indulges in a kaleidoscope of pranks and puppetry that are promptly forgotten by the reader; nor does he spare us pages of practical jokes, misunderstandings, mistaken identities, coups de théâtre, sudden recognition and reunion, and, of course, a good deal of farce.9 Halfway through, the novel becomes shapeless as it opens the door to more and more digressions, curious anecdotes and pedantically learned disquisitions on this or that subject,10 which bring the story to a halt. When the little group of travellers reaches Scotland, in the middle of a host of comic, or just interesting anecdotes, the scene is stolen by a series of heated exchanges between Bramble and a new addition to their number, the Scot Lismahago, on the differing merits of England and Scotland in relation to the union of the crowns of 1707. Once this subject has been sufficiently debated, the novel becomes a kind of travel guide, full of detailed and often shrewd notes on the countryside, historical personages and manners and usages that include local culinary specialities. Their stay in Scotland turns out to be good for everyone, especially Bramble, who revises many of his former opinions and comes away with a more positive impression

9

Especially in the Scottish episodes of the second part, with the practical joke Jery plays on the lawyer, Micklewhimmen, and Sir Bullford’s pranks against Lismahago, who reacts indignantly. The last jape is played at the expense of the newly wed Clinker and Jenkins, who find their marriage bed occupied by a cat ‘shod with walnut shells’. Another case of misunderstanding is when Jery and Tabitha spy on what they believe is Bramble’s seduction of a widow, when all he is doing is helping her out with the gift of twenty guineas. Again, Tabitha attributes to Jery’s old friend, Barton, a declaration of love and proposal of marriage which is, instead, directed at Lydia. 10 Like the one on ‘stinks’, that ‘smells’ a little of Swift, and a bit of Burton, with its paradoxical demonstration and case history of excrement (that spills over into the repugnant and repulsive). It is no coincidence that the author is a doctor, or philosopher, who is repelled by the present company and gets his come-uppance when he is disfigured during the removal of a wart from his nose.

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of England’s northern neighbour. The discovery of the real identity of Clinker,11 and, above all, the three weddings (Lydia-George, TabithaLismahago and Jenkins-Clinker, the second of which being particularly farcical owing to the ridiculous, old-fashioned clothes they wear)12 mark the conclusion of a journey towards maturity, from which only Jery is, in a way, excluded. He does not even attempt to court Letty, Lydia’s friend, though he is attracted to her. Obsessed with the transience of beauty, he remains the rake he was at the beginning of the novel. However, at the end of the journey, he, like the others, understands ‘what flagrant injustice […] and what absurd judgment we form in viewing objects through the falsifying mediums of prejudice and passion’. He goes on: ‘Without all doubt, the greatest advantage required in travelling and perusing mankind in the original, is that of dispelling those shameful clouds that darken the faculties of the mind, preventing it from judging with candour and precision’. Bramble, for his part, acknowledges the sins of his youth and returns from the journey much restored in health, and aware that at his age a person must avoid a sedentary existence and lead a life as full as possible of movement and the pleasures of company. He even goes so far as to renege on the whole novel by promising to write no more tedious letters to his correspondents! 2. The introductory letters present the usual fiction: certain letters have come into the hands of the undersigned – usually the actual author – whose job it is to present them for publication ‘for the information and

11

12

The pathos is tempered by a hint of comedy: in his excitement, Clinker drops the heavy coal shovel on Lismahago’s foot. Humphry’s arrival and inclusion in the plot happens as follows: the coach carrying Bramble, Tabitha and Jenkins overturns on the way to London; the two women are left shrieking and waving their legs in the air, while Bramble, who has lost his wig, finds himself hugging Jenkins’s buttocks as his sister frantically calls out for her dog, Chowder. The coach is mended but a new postilion is demanded by Tabitha, and who should this replacement be but Clinker, who scandalizes the ladies because of his ‘nudities’ and moves Bramble to pity for the same reason. Lismahago was first lost then found again after miraculously escaping from quicksands. Bramble offers him hospitality for the winter, and in this way Lismahago becomes engaged to Tabitha, to Matthew’s great joy, as he is thus rid of ‘a troublesome and tyrannic gouvernante’.

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edification of mankind’. For his part, the publisher replies by pointing out his scruples as regards the tastes of the reading public and the commercial viability of the letters in question; he adds a caveat on punishments incurred by publishers and editors in the event of legal action being brought against the publication. In Humphry Clinker the letters are not one way, but constitute an exchange of missives involving five correspondents, with fixed pairs writing on a subject that ends up by identifying them. The result is a wide, multi-faceted spectrum of opinions and points of view that anticipates by fifty years nineteenth-century literary relativism, though Smollett is not the first to experiment with the ‘polyphonic’ epistolary novel.13 Each of the five correspondents is immediately identifiable through the contents of the letters, and, especially, the style and linguistic idiosyncrasies that act as a kind of signature. Bramble’s are prickly, scratching letters, not without a vein of humour and genuine feeling; Jery’s letters to his college friend are refined, clever, with frequent exchanges of erudite, often satirical jokes; the only letter signed by Wilson is a parody full of Shakespearean allusions, in which he bids farewell to Lydia, whose letters to her friend Letty at the convent school in Gloucester are those of an immature, languid, even swooning young lady. Quite different is Tabitha’s first letter to the trusty administrator she has left looking after her property in Wales. All Tabitha’s letters are marked by spelling mistakes that encapsulate hilarious doubleentendres or scatological insinuations, a trait which is found in even greater abundance in the letters from Jenkins.14 This is more than mere linguistic realism. Matthew Bramble’s trademark is to be tormented by gout, which drives him to seek relief in the waters of various spas of whose efficacy he 13 See especially C. Anstey, New Bath Guide (1766). 14 The scatological double meaning is never far away: ‘shit’ for ‘shut’, found again in a later instance, where ‘beshits’ is used instead of ‘beseech’; in Jenkins’s letters we have ‘piss’ for ‘piece’ and ‘ars’ for ‘ears’, and the deformation of the name ‘Lismahago’ into ‘Kismycago’. There are many other, more transparent, lexical manglings, like ‘fizzogmony’ for ‘physiognomy’, ‘honymil’ for ‘animal’, or ‘God’s grease’ instead of ‘God’s grace’. In short, there is no escaping the fact that Smollett may be considered one of the many ‘grandfathers’ of the author of Finnegans Wake (see J. M. Warner, Joyce’s Grandfathers: Myth and History in Defoe, Smollett, Sterne, and Joyce, Athens, GA 1993).

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is profoundly sceptical. Right from the beginning, his disease provides the refrain of his letters along with the psychological torture of having to be responsible for a niece and a nephew. He is a wealthy but generous landowner, who, unlike his sister, gives what exceeds his needs to the poor. He is indulgent with his neighbours and tenants and a benefactor to whoever is in need.15 A bachelor, he feels no desire to embrace the folly of married life, though it is rumoured that he has left scattered here and there more than one illegitimate child (this turns out to be true in part). The selfportrait that merges from his letters is confirmed with reservations by the other characters, in particular Jery, who describes his uncle first as a hypochondriac and misanthropist, only to correct the verdict and add that his cynicism is due to his sickness and an excess of sentimental morbidity just as his misanthropy is only a mask for his sensitivity. In the course of the correspondence, and before the arrival in Scotland, Bramble’s dark mood and hypochondria intensifies: in his sickness he conjures up terrifyingly macabre pictures of the infected waters of the spas they visit, and launches into a crusade against pollution and the adulteration of drinks offered for sale. The ‘catalogue of London delights’ contains items to turn the strongest stomachs: the vegetables are boiled with copper coins to improve their colour, the green colour of the oysters comes from ‘the vitriolic scum, which rises on the surface of the stagnant and stinking water’, and the fruit is cleaned with the vendor’s spittle. Bramble’s letter of 8 May underlines his fear of life, his innate pessimism, and his tendency to play the victim. The episode when he passes out at the ball provides an excellent opportunity for another Swiftian analysis of the ‘mixture of offensive smells’ that caused it. The list of various parts of the body in different stages of putrefaction makes painful reading, as does the physiological theory of the human being as made up of ‘matter’ that relates him closely to the animal world. Faced with Clinker’s infatuation with Methodism, Bramble declares he believes only in ‘the light of reason’ and denies the possibility of supernatural intervention in human affairs, like fairies, elves and other so-called spiritual 15

One of Bramble’s last acts of generosity is to help and comfort his friend, Baynard, after the death of his wife. Tabitha looks him up and down, leading the reader to suspect she may have had second thoughts about Lismahago.

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entities.16 Here and there, he displays his anti-Puritanism, as, for example, in his aversion for his own Christian name, derived from the Gospels, and his barbed comments on Cromwell. In her first letter home, Tabitha asks to be sent various items of clothing, trinkets and jewels; throughout the novel she shows signs of her avaricious nature, always asking about the produce of the farm, and the yield from the sale of this or that field; she also wants to appear as morally upright (she is always recommending keeping a tight rein on the maids, who tend to be too familiar with the men-servants). In reality, this is all show, and her hunt for a husband is virtually incessant. Jery calls her ‘ridiculous’, and draws a striking psychological and physical portrait of this vain and greedy woman and her pursuit of what it would be too ennobling to call ‘love’.17 Jery, Bramble’s nephew, has just completed his course of studies at Oxford, where he is suspected of having fathered an illegitimate child – something of which he boasts (at the end of the novel this is denied by the supposed mother). He considers himself rather ‘cheerful’, but is, in fact, a bit of a moralist, and, like his uncle, sexually repressive towards Lydia. Lismahago, the Scottish knight, a descendant, in a way, of the Launcelot Greaves of Smollett’s earlier novel, is a variant of Don Quixote in bearing, actions, and blunders. His patched and plastered head bears witness to an encounter with the Indians of North America, he tells Tabitha, who has immediately decided he might be a likely candidate for her hand. He recounts his story, and reveals how, when a soldier in that part of the world, he was captured by an Indian tribe, and made to marry a squaw, of whom he gives a grisly description. Lismahago’s observations on literature and language in the course of his conversations with Bramble are perspicacious and pondered, and prove the author’s serious interest in language and style, embedded though they be within the fiction of the novel.

16 17

With reference to Enlightenment rationalism, see also his criticism of the blessing of cemeteries as a sign of superstition, and the figure of the friend, Hewitt, who meets Voltaire in order to eliminate superstition once and for all. The brief flirt with Sir Ulic at Bath comes to an end because one morning, at breakfast, before the ball, the baronet gives Chowder, Tabitha’s dog, a resounding kick in the teeth, not knowing who it belongs to. He apologizes, but to no avail (in reality, he has found out she is not as rich as he had thought).

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Scots, it would seem, is the language that best preserves the archaisms of Spenser, Chaucer and Shakespeare, which have become incomprehensible to English readers. Lismahago also provides an opportunity to debate a number of motions on controversial issues – that commerce is ruining the country; that freedom of the press is an evil; that the jury system was ‘productive of injustice’. On many of these subjects, Lismahago’s position coincides with that of Bramble. 3. Not all Bramble’s opinions can be attributed to Smollett himself: they are, after all, filtered through the deforming lens of sickness, and are to be read in the context of the relativism of the points of view of the various correspondents.18 However, it can be said that, using Bramble as his mouthpiece, Smollett takes the reader on a guided tour through the sights and sounds, modes and manners, virtue and vices of late eighteenth-century England. First of all, he is openly distrustful of the city as an institution, and idealizes the healthy life of the countryside, where he lives, and to which he cannot wait to return. In one of his finest letters, he sings the praises of the country and the freshness of its produce. When the company moves on into Scotland, Smollett becomes the hymnist of the wild, rugged beauty of the Highland landscape (this is just before ‘Romantic’ sensibility emerged, along with the mania for Scottish exoticism, and just after the ‘Ossian affair’). In Humphry Clinker, on the banks of Loch Lomond, the cult of the Lake District might be said to been born, and the site is celebrated as a new Arcadia. Quite to the contrary, Smollett always depicts Bath as the ne plus ultra of unnatural frivolity, where fatuous parvenus congregate to strut and show off their emptiness.19 The architecture of the town is criticized as being mean and ugly, a blot on the landscape, and the town itself is presented as a place of cult, filled to bursting by lunatic idolaters. Lydia, of course, gives a completely different account: gaiety abounds, the air is full of pleasant sounds, the Master of Ceremonies is delightful, and the 18 19

Jery comments on his uncle’s opinion of Bath: ‘What tickles another would give him torment’. The arrival is marked by a sequence of different noises – fighting dogs, the row caused by an Irish knight during the dancing lesson, the ringing of the bells, and the two soldiers practising on the horn.

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architecture is enchanting. Jery, too, puts a positive spin on the variety of people that flock to take the waters, and the very chaos is a ‘perpetual source of vexation’. Once the company reaches London, the first thing that strikes Bramble is how much the city has expanded, with green fields swallowed up by buildings. Worthy of Hogarth is the picture of supposedly superfluous pleasures, and the Londoners’ love of ease and idleness. Bramble also reflects on the frenetic pace of life in London, a prophetic remark, indeed, on the characteristics of a modern metropolis. In the next letter, Lydia, naturally, idealizes the very aspects of city life condemned by her uncle. Jenkins does so, too. The criticism of manners, begun in the letters on the fatuous world of Bath, spares practically nothing in English social life. Bramble is the prophet of a gentleman that he never actually finds in all his wandering; as in Richardson, the aristocracy and the ruling class are in definite decline, and, especially in the Scottish part, we invariably meet noblemen who are broke, or haughty and unwelcoming, or lazy, though amusing, carousers. Even if he is not without his part of responsibility, Bramble denounces the corruption of politicians and the rampant dishonesty of civil servants. The reception to which he and his nephew are invited allows them to see with their own eyes the great world of politics. The duke that Bramble bows to, and who equivocates at length on his (Bramble’s) identity, is the prototype of the worst kind of politician, garrulous, forgetful and vague. After the world of politics, the satirical spotlight is turned on the literary scene, in the grip of ‘the spirit of party’ that has invaded every area of life. We are introduced to a fashionable writer who pontificates on everything, and demolishes the great authors of the past, but leaves the room when a literary rival appears. Thanks to an acquaintance, Jery is invited to a literary gathering (the writers involved are all little better than hacks). The description of the party evidences the grotesque, Swiftian eccentricity of the participants, and highlights their affected speech and strange behaviour that would be more at home in a psychiatric ward. 4. The revelation that Clinker is Bramble’s illegitimate son seems to shift Humphry Clinker towards Richardson’s condemnation of libertinism and the effete, corrupt aristocracy of the day: Bramble bemoans his roué past, and Tabitha observes that Clinker far outstrips her brother in moral terms. The satire on Methodism, and ‘enthusiastic’ religion in general,

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focuses on the character of Clinker when he turns passionate preacher after meeting Wesley in person, and attempts to sow the seeds in the various members of the company, who prove mainly to be barren ground. The description of religious ecstasy recalls Swift’s Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit. While Matthew and Jery drag their feet, others, mainly Tabitha, see in religion a way to further their ends: Tabitha is unwilling to leave Edinburgh because of an unfinished debate on theology she was having with a suitor, while Lydia quite clearly considers religion to be a ‘bait’ to ‘catch’ a husband. When Humphry, though innocent, is put in prison, the gaoler protests jokingly that his preaching has killed off the sales of beer, and that all the inmates have become saints. Smollett seems to be no more indulgent towards Catholicism, if we are to interpret as his the words put into self-styled free-thinker Lismahago’s mouth, according to which the Red Indians rightly refuse to believe in a ‘multiplication’ of God ‘by the help of a little flour and water’. § 127. Sterne* I: ‘Tristram Shandy’, or concerning relations The antithetical binomial association/dissociation, in its wide gamut of literal, derived and loose meanings – which may refer to literary history, 1

*

Works, ed. G. Saintsbury, 6 vols, London 1894, now replaced by the Florida Edition, ed. M. New et al., 8 vols (the last two consist of the letters), Gainesville, FL 1978–2008. Of the various Italian translations of Tristram Shandy, the one edited by A. Meo, Torino 1958 and 1990, has a foreword by Carlo Levi, which, long before the birth of narratology, focused on the difference between the author and the empiric first-person narrator, identifying in the exorcism of death and time the secret autobiographical motivation behind the deferred writing. Life. W. L. Cross, The Life and Times of Laurence Sterne, New Haven, CT 1909, 1925, 1929; A. H. Cash, Laurence Sterne: The Early and Middle Years, London 1975, and Laurence Sterne: The Later Years, London 1986, 1992; I. C. Ross, Laurence Sterne: A Life, Oxford 2001. Criticism. V. Shklovsky, ‘La parodia del romanzo: Tristram Shandy’, in Una teoria della prosa, Bari 1966, 143–78 (It. trans., first Russian edn 1917); G. Rabizzani, Sterne in Italia, Roma 1920; L. P. Curtis, The Politics of Laurence Sterne, Oxford and London 1929; E. N. Dilworth, The Unsentimental Journey of Laurence Sterne, London 1948; L. v. d. Heyden Hammond, Laurence Sterne’s ‘Sermons of Mr Yorick’, New Haven,

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philosophy, theology, epistemology, as well as the formal and structural aspects of novel-writing – provides a key, if not, indeed, the key to Tristram Shandy (1759–1767)1 by Laurence Sterne (1713–1768): and since Sterne is, practically, a one-book man (the Sentimental Journey might be seen

CT 1948; D. W. Jefferson, Laurence Sterne, London 1954, 1968; J. Traugott, Tristram Shandy’s World: Sterne’s Philosophical Rhetoric, Berkeley, CA 1954; A. B. Howes, Yorick and the Critics, New Haven, CT 1958, 1971; H. Fluchère, Laurence Sterne, de l’homme à l’œuvre, Paris 1961, translated and abridged as Laurence Sterne: From Tristram to Yorick, London 1965; W. B. Piper, Laurence Sterne, New York 1965; A. Cash, Sterne’s Comedy of Moral Sentiments, Pittsburgh, PA 1966; L. C. Hartley, Laurence Sterne in the Twentieth Century, Chapel Hill, NC 1966, 1968; J. M. Stedmond, The Comic Art of Laurence Sterne, Toronto 1967; M. New, Laurence Sterne as Satirist: A Reading of ‘Tristram Shandy’, Gainesville, FL 1969; W. V. Holtz, Image and Immortality: A Study of ‘Tristram Shandy’, Providence, RI 1970; The Winged Skull, ed. A. Cash and J. M. Stedmond, London 1971; R. A. Lanham, ‘Tristram Shandy’: The Games of Pleasure, Berkeley, CA 1973; CRHE, ed. A. B. Howes, London 1974; H. Moglen, The Philosophical Irony of Laurence Sterne, Gainesville, FL 1975; L. Innocenti, ‘Tristram Shandy: “ens reale” ed “ens rationis”’, Linguistica e letteratura, I, no. 2 (1976), 299–330, ‘La narrativa come spazialità del tempo. A proposito di Tristram Shandy’, Lingua e stile, XIII, no. 1 (1978), 41–57, and ‘La comunicazione sentimentale: Laurence Sterne e il Settecento inglese’, in Il romanzo sentimentale (1740–1814), various eds, Pordenone 1990, 67–92; W. Freedman, Laurence Sterne and the Origins of the Musical Novel, Athens, GA 1978; M. Loveridge, Laurence Sterne and the Argument about Design, London 1982; Laurence Sterne: Riddles and Mysteries, ed. V. G. Myer, London 1984; M. Byrd, ‘Tristram Shandy’, London 1985; W. Iser, ‘Tristram Shandy’, Cambridge 1988; R. Whittaker, ‘Tristram Shandy’, Milton Keynes 1988; J. Lamb, Sterne’s Fiction and the Double Principle, Cambridge 1989; Effetto Sterne, ed. G. Mazzacurati, Pisa 1990, also author of Il fantasma di Yorick. Laurence Sterne e il romanzo sentimentale, Napoli 2006; C. M. Laudando, Parody, paratext, palimpsest. A study of intertextual strategies in the writings of Laurence Sterne, Napoli 1995; T. Keymer, Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel, Oxford 2002, also editor of The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne, Cambridge 2009; W. B. Gerard, Laurence Sterne and the Visual Imagination, Aldershot 2006; P. Pepe, La linea spezzata. Corpo e mente nel ‘Tristram Shandy’ di Sterne, Bologna 2012. 1

Publication of the novel began in 1759, appearing at irregular intervals in pairs of volumes. After the publication of the fifth and sixth volumes Sterne went to France, where he spent a year collecting material for the seventh and following volumes.

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as a kind of appendix), the key to the whole of Sterne. Tristram Shandy acquired a reputation as being a hapax legomenon of the novel genre with reference to the period 1760–1770, and in fact, of the whole of the eighteenth century, because it clearly and boldly breaks with anything written by novelists before him. And yet, the setting is familiar: like Tom Jones, it describes ‘family life’ in rural England: the scene, a country house, the actors the squire, his wife and the servants, with the addition of the local vicar2 and the doctor (standard figures in Fielding and Goldsmith, too). The mainspring of the action is the conception and birth of the principal character. If Tom Jones cannot be said to contain much of the opinions of the eponymous hero, insisting as it does on his breakneck adventures and the scrapes he gets into, Sterne’s book is brim-full of Tristram’s musings and reflections; an entire book is dedicated to his journey to France, with an account not only of his philandering but also of the places he visits and the strange and eccentric people he meets. Both Fielding and Sterne are conversationalists, and chat continuously with the reader, sometimes, in Sterne’s case, underlining the immediacy of the colloquial discourse by means of exclamations and direct appeals to the attention of his supposed interlocutor. On a formal plane, the narrating voice is that of Tristram Shandy, but the Henry Fielding that speaks from the pages of Tom Jones is a fiction, too, and the author’s mask, not his true self. After an initial burst of notoriety, and accompanying success, Tristram Shandy fell into the clutches of illustrious censors, too bigoted and self-righteous to admit that a man of God, albeit a mere Anglican, might write a work that, in their eyes, was nothing but a hotchpotch of obscenities, double-entendres, and discourses unfit for polite conversation, or works of literature. So Tristram Shandy never created a ‘school’, or ‘influenced’ other writers: it had to wait for the twentieth-century modernists to find ears and eyes that could respond in full, or at least to a greater degree, to its revolutionary form. In other words, from a literary point of view it was ahead of its time, though in biographical terms it was a late bloom – the first two volumes were published when 2

Yorick, like Fielding, cannot tolerate affectation. The famous chapter on the legitimacy of digressions echoes the opening chapters of the various books of Tom Jones, and constitutes an early criticism, or critical fiction, of the book.

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Sterne was forty-seven, an age at which the average writer was rounding off, rather than beginning, his career. The Romantics (at least, the English ones) and the Victorians were critical, not to say disgusted by the novel. Taine attempted to explain the eccentricity of the text by referring to the ‘Celtic factor’, which he called ‘the Irish tone’. His diagnosis was far from flattering: the aberrations of a twisted imagination, which takes pleasure in repugnant concepts, just ‘as spoiled palates are pleased by the pungent flavour of decayed cheese’.3 Praz4 likened Sterne’s style to what was happening in the field of painting at the time: historical subjects had had their day, and were being replaced by scenes of everyday life, in what was to become known as genre painting, in which subject and frame were often inverted and minutiae often cluttered the canvas. 2. Association: in describing the working of the human mind as the free play of numberless associations, Sterne anticipates the theories that Freud started to develop 100 years later, and, on a more specifically literary level, the new narratological techniques of Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Sterne was discovered to be a modernist despite the great chronological divide. When critics in the early twentieth century were busy pushing backwards in time writers like Hopkins, Sterne and others were being moved forwards, and nominated honorary masters of Modernism: ‘Sterne is singularly of our own age’, proclaimed Virginia Woolf.5 T. S. Eliot is not known to have written anything substantial on Sterne, but it might be argued that Tristram Shandy represents, all in all, a triumphant ‘re-association’ of sensibility. One might, at the risk of being accused of reductionism and lèse-majesté, consider seventeenth-century Metaphysical literature a game of mental hopscotch; when it is Sterne doing the ‘hopping’, he is tacitly taken to be doing it spontaneously and without fully being aware of it. Joyce, Woolf and their fellow modernists saw in Sterne the shifting of the focus of attention from life as action to life as mental activity; hence the emphasis on thoughts that would ordinarily be classified as idle, banal, pointless or even sterile – in short, much of the mental detritus rejected by conventional 3 4 5

TAI, vol. III, 310. PSL, 359. Essay on Sentimental Journey, in TCR, Second Series, 81.

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novelists, but which goes to form a kind of analysis of everyday psychopathology based on ‘Freudian lapsus’ and the convergence of apparently random thoughts on the sexual sphere. A sex-centred psyche, then, albeit subconscious. For Sterne, as for Virginia Woolf, time is not linear, as measured by a clock; it is, rather, synchronic, even regressive, and is entirely interior to the mind. Both writers practise a kind of narrative that might be defined, loosely, as psychoanalytical, because it underlines how deeply the experiences of childhood influence the personality of the adult. Joyce never intrudes in his text as obviously as Sterne (or Sterne’s alter ego), even explicitly, as the author; but one of the many analogies between the two is the ‘hobbyhorse’, to use Sterne’s expression: Bloom is ‘Sternian’ (or should we say ‘Shandean’?) because he is characterized by his fixations; his mental life is steered by the tugs of certain magnets, or, to change the metaphor, reacts like litmus paper to its environment. Sterne and Joyce both delight in incessant variation of the stylistic register: Sterne is forever inserting extraneous material that seems at odds with the context; in Ulysses Joyce displays his command of different registers episode after episode, and even within the same episode, as in those of the Citizen and the Hospital, the latter consisting of sixty passages in prose, each a parody of some stage of development of the English language. In the spirit of Sterne, I will now insert two sub-sections in my presentation of his work, which will be followed by a demonstration of how Sterne announces to Joyce the beginning of speech and language, using the metaphor of childbirth. 3. The Metaphysical association of sensibility is thus reformulated by Sterne: ‘the transitions of his passions were unaccountably sudden’.6 As a narrative technique it consists of an indiscriminate profusion of quotations from widely different sources, uttered by the narrator, with repercussions on the mode of expression of the characters themselves. Sterne parodies the leftovers of medieval learning long since discarded by the mainstream, but still living in the memory of the few. He is a prisoner of this learning, but breaks free by writing about it. Though the old pseudo-science of Scholasticism is dead and buried, it still constitutes a rich source of

6

Said about Mr Shandy.

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inspiration for his comic genius. This strange example of survival can be explained by the fact that English culture often lags behind its European counterpart. Sterne really is the metempsychosis of the Robert Burton of the Anatomy in his pedantic, polyglot utterances on a host of quite outlandish subjects. First of all, the forward movement of the story is continually halted and frustrated by the omnipresent digression. Mr and Mrs Shandy have agreed that Tristram should be born in London, and we are invited to read in full the document signed by both parties in this regard, obviously complete with parody of legal cant phrases. We are treated to an unabridged imaginary academic disputation in French on the theological question of whether the sacrament of baptism may be administered to the foetus, and, if it may, whether this should by done by means of a petite cannule. The text of a sermon slips out from between the pages of some book or other and is read there and then. Doctor Slop cuts his finger and lets out an oath, which offers a cue for the reading of the whole of Bishop Ernulf ’s proclamation of excommunication – in Latin, with facing English translation. A further dilatory strategy is the embedded story, responding to a logic of overlapping or associative connection. One example of this is the ninth, and last, book, dealing with Trim’s affair with the beguine, which parallels and underscores Uncle Toby’s dalliance with widow Wadman. The story ambles along, only to be interrupted yet again, this time by the anecdote of the King of Bohemia and his seven castles. Sterne’s associationism derives from Locke, who saw the mind as an isolated monad, and, at the same time, as a jungle of all sorts of entwined and entangled thoughts (III, 9). The modernists went to Bergson for the concept of durée, but this was already familiar to Sterne (in III, 18), who has Shandy begin a dissertation on how two hours and ten minutes seem like ‘almost an age’. The novel is strewn with unforgettable instances of characters going off at a tangent on their own particular hobbyhorses. Uncle Toby, a prototype for the shell-shocked soldier of the First World War, is a demonstration, along with Corporal Trim, of how any given word or concept can trigger a sequence of memories and associations, and even entail unforeseen consequences in terms of actions. Take, for example, the famous case of the fly that is carefully put out of the window: the incident is inserted by the narrator because of association, or, rather, by the extension of a proverbial

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expression (‘my uncle Toby had scarce a heart to retaliate upon a fly’, itself a flash-forward to when the protagonist is ten years old); or the end of volume three, when the term ‘bridge’ is interpreted by the various characters differently, according to their mindset, causing some quite exhilarating misunderstandings. Sterne focuses on psychological dissociation in its various manifestations. Shandy is dissociated because he commits a second misdemeanour (the first was not concentrating properly on the act of ‘generating’ Tristram nine months before): instead of taking care of his child, he spends his time writing a treatise, the Tristriapaedia, on how to take care of the child and educate him. 4. A further implication of associationism is found on the plane of the Weltanschauung. Sterne, like Joyce, believes that all existing phenomena are interconnected; it is not quite the medieval ‘chain of being’, but similar. Everything in Sterne has a position and is related to something else, insofar as it is the organic creation of the divine, and must fulfil its purpose and run its course. Technically speaking, Tristram Shandy is ‘programmatically unprogrammed’; the writer is dissociated from the act of writing itself, and the pen is pointed to as the real author: ‘Ask my pen, – it governs me, – I govern it not.’7 The disorderliness of the writing contrasts with the orderliness of the writer, but only superficially, notwithstanding the labyrinthine weave of the text. Tristram Shandy describes a circle – or, rather, the circle is almost complete, a fraction away from spherical perfection, but never achieves it. Behind all its extraneous paraphernalia, the symbolic itinerary is simple, and will be taken up by Joyce in all its bareness: the stages of the journey are conception, birth, life, death, regeneration. Sterne never discovers the purpose of creation and the meaning of life. Of course, the message, or non-message, is conveyed, as in Joyce, by means of irony and humour, ‘the interpenetration of the sacred and the profane’ of which Christopher Ricks speaks.8 Neither the association of sensibility nor the historical finalism exude any of the metaphysical, esoteric mysticism 7 8

Ironically, or, rather, quite sincerely, the missing chapter contributes to the overall harmony of the construction: the aim is, as always, ‘to keep up some sort of connection in my works’. Introduction to the Penguin edition, Harmondsworth 1967, 19.

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of, say, Donne. The tone is light-hearted, mocking, sceptical. Plot in Tristram Shandy is crucial, but only in the literal meaning of the word, not its technical sense: the weaving together of different strands, or, in musical terminology, of leitmotifs. Its nine volumes illustrate the temperamental nature of the various characters, each of which is fixed in his or her ‘humour’: there is no growth, and all the characters are very much alike (as its early critics unanimously complained).9 The plot – the classic one, that is, not the Sternian kind – is non-existent: the reader will look in vain for a regular sequence of events, with a before and an after. Tristram Shandy begins (and takes quite some time in doing so) very early on in the life of its hero, and ends where other formation novels normally begin. Sterne lingers on the pre-natal dimension, the act of conception and that of birth itself. He is silent on the later ‘deeds’ of his hero. To make up for the lack of a traditional plot and a reassuring narrative flow, Sterne offers a gallery of ‘characters’ – Shandy Sr with his philosophical obsessions, Uncle Toby with his legendary groin wound from the siege of Namur, Corporal Trim who seconds and supports Toby’s hobbyhorse, which consists of reconstructing a scale model of the siege in his back garden; Doctor Slop, and, of course, Parson Yorick. Understandably, given the predominance of the theatre a couple of generations before him, and its continuing vibrations in his day, Sterne takes his comedy, or pantomime, of humours directly from Jonson, with the usual stock of jokes, misunderstandings and muddles. In the general plan of the work, there is only one volume that is clearly inferior to the other eight, although the first five volumes constitute the most accomplished and memorable part of the whole. The volume in question is the seventh, which deals with Tristram’s tour of France in a quite distant past, in which the family group is missing. To be sure, the volume is enlivened by a number of salacious episodes that recall Chaucer, like the one of the abbess and the novice and their problems with their recalcitrant mules; or that of the visit to the mummies of Auxerre. However, to justify the inclusion of this volume in the architecture of the novel, one would have to discover a new associationist link.

9

SDR, 197–8.

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5. One of the mnemonic devices that could be applied to Ulysses is to think of it in terms of the cycle of birth-life-death-regeneration: for example, the imminent birth of Mrs Purefoy’s child is referred to in a whole series of allusions, culminating in an entire episode that takes place in the hospital: in what appears to be a deliberate parody of Sterne, Mrs Purefoy gives birth while in a nearby vestibule a group of men converse cheerfully on a variety of subjects of different degrees of seriousness, at times coming out with quite irreverent quips.10 This episode is counterbalanced by another set in a cemetery, thus hypothesizing the equation of life equals death with the uncertain prospect of regeneration. One might say, to be more precise, that Tristram Shandy is obstetric, foetal in a literal sense, and irresistibly evokes the poetry of Dylan Thomas: both Sterne and Thomas dwell on pre-natal bliss as against the disaster of actual birth and coming into the world, which is the equivalent of starting the journey that leads inevitably to death. However, for Sterne, life must be accepted, even if it is a journey of descent through a degraded and degenerate world in which redemption is conspicuous for its absence. Many critics see Tristram as a metaphor of death deferred, but this is the same as saying birth deferred since birth is the beginning of dying. However that may be, it is important for the family and for the universe in general to be born ‘well’, where ‘well’ refers not only to the medical and hygienic conditions of the event but to the logistics, too. This is not in contradiction – quite the opposite – to a parallel feeling of imminent disaster, as if, at any moment, the whole universe were to crumble or explode. All this, of course, is conveyed with Sterne’s typical

10

The memorable hospital episode of volume three is a great example of birth expected and birth deferred: the events taking place on the floor above are forgotten, as in Joyce, or are recalled only occasionally; four solipsists, unmindful of where they are, are engaged in a contest of wit and equivocation. There is an enormous gap between the banality of the action (the taking out of a handkerchief ) and the amount of text devoted to its minutely detailed description accompanied by extraneous digressions. The narrator himself, or at least his voice, intervenes in the discussion and becomes a character, observed in turn by a ghostly second narrator (an erroneous supposition made by Tristram is corrected by Sterne, as it were, in a footnote).

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irony and humour.11 When he is told of the death of his first son, Shandy Sr meticulously rises from his bed and says that, although by being born we are ushered into a vale of tears, yet one must carry on in the certainty that the good Lord will attenuate the decreed suffering by means of various blessings and balms, including sleep. Faced with the drama of life, one can but smile and say ‘Begone dull care!’ In effect, one of the ‘opinions’ of Tristram Shandy is that life must be safeguarded, and that in order to guarantee an auspicious birth, the act of copulation must be carried out, as it were, reverently, since it is in copulation that the seed is sown. Hence the importance – social, civil, hygienic and eugenic – attributed to the village midwife, an obstetric innovation for which Parson Yorick is showered with well-deserved praise. 6. A stalwart supporter of the medieval chain of being, Shandy Sr is also a late exponent of a ‘symbolic’ culture: names are ‘omens’, and, in giving a new-born child a name one is pointing him in a certain direction; very likely, someone with a name rich in history will identify with its more famous bearer. It is an error to suppose that there is no relationship between parents and children. A similar symbolic view is discussed even if not shared by the narrator. A concordance of the novel would show how frequently the word ‘depend’ is used. Life is a series of causes and effects, some of them psychological, as in the case of Uncle Toby, whose physical wound from the siege of Namur is accompanied by what today would be called PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). The sermon on conscience, which is given in its entirety, is another demonstration of how human affairs are interconnected: there can be no morality without religion; the two are ‘interdependent’. More often, the causative mechanism is connected to effects of unbridled humour, or else bathos. In the Shandy residence, drawing room and kitchen are the scenes of parallel discourses. When five-year-old Tristram pees out the window, this too is linked to the idea of dependence, since in that particular house and family, nothing ‘hangs’

11

Cf. the very same observations by Sertoli in SDR, 220. On the following page, however, it is more difficult to agree that twentieth-century modernist fiction is ruled by the ‘tragic pathos’ of agnosticism.

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quite as it should, and so the sash breaks and down comes the window with a crash, nearly castrating poor Tristram. The red-hot chestnut that ends up in the aperture of Phutatorius’ breeches is a comic example of a cause with a physiological effect, according to Sterne: an imprecation. Death does put in an appearance in the novel, but it is Bobby’s, and it seems quite logical that Mr Shandy should cite the Thracians, who used to cry when a child was born, and rejoice when he died, for thus he was rid of suffering of life. So, a death is matched by a birth; the two extremities overlap. The dominating thought, as for example in the sixth episode of Ulysses, is that life leads to death, and as Joyce says, extremes meet. The laboured birth of Uncle Toby’s affair with widow Wadman is extraordinarily prophetic, and anticipates Joyce and the metaphor of the birth of speech and the language of literature. In one sense, this tortuous beginning parallels the phases of Tristram’s birth, and seems to echo it. In another way, it is the literary birth of Tristram-Sterne that is botched, and has to be done all over again. The embedded story of the king of Bohemia is started and interrupted time and again by Uncle Toby’s objections as to procedure. It cannot and does not begin. Once again, the labour of childbirth lies behind the letter of the text. The end of Tristram Shandy envisages a resumption of the basic pattern of conception-birth-life-death-regeneration: a wedding is in the offing, but just as death was ‘transferred’ to Bobby, so the joy of marriage is to be given, not to the hero, but to Uncle Toby. In other words, the great symbolic events are present and recognizable, and it does not matter to whom they are connected: like an organ keyboard, the notes can be played on various levels. Of weddings, that very obvious and visible symbolic act, there is not one but two: Trim recounts the injudicious union between his brother and the widow of a sausage-maker, a Jewess, to boot. In any case, celebrations are suspended, and neither wedding actually takes place, or so it seems (false rumours on Toby’s supposed impotence, and other prejudices get in the way). The end, however, is near. 7. The leading authors of the modernist movement gave their protagonists names like Jacob, Aaron, Dedalus, Brangwen, and thrust them, weighed down as they were by all the irony of their appellatives, into the unheroic prose of contemporaneity. Yet modernist criticism seems to have been incapable of tracing in Tristram the mythical method institutionalized

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by T. S. Eliot. I can find no discussion, in modernist or postmodernist criticism, of the highly refined Arthurian subtext of Sterne’s novel, for example. Mr Shandy intended his son to be christened with the pompous name of ‘Trismegistus’, which is communicated, understandably and fortunately mangled by a serving-girl, to the vicar who is to impart the sacrament. The whole relationship of Tristram Shandy with its Arthurian sources lies in this mangling, this misunderstanding. Tristram and Iseult is one of several Middle English poems that flourished on English soil. Mr Shandy forewarns us of impending parody when, after the birth and baptism of our hero, he sets to writing a Tristriapaedia;12 the novel is, after all, a ‘Tristaneid’ – mockheroic, decidedly comic, written, spoken and sung by the hero himself. His song fills nine books, as opposed to the Virgilian twelve or Homeric twenty-four. Tristan’s wound is downgraded and becomes the near miss of the window sash, or the squashing of the hero’s nose as he pushes his way out of his mother and into the world (the nose, according to Mr Shandy’s theory, represents the penis). Nor has the critical community attempted to explain the seventh book, apparently so out of place in the otherwise impeccable structure of the novel. Tristram is denied even the faintest trace of an Iseult or an apprenticeship for heroic deeds, and yet the abovementioned seventh book does contain movement and what might just be deemed ‘deeds’, including those of an amatory nature. Before the 1920s, Russian formalism turned its attention to Sterne, with the result that, for the next thirty years, the dominating critical approach was almost exclusively, and excessively, technical. For V. Shklovsky, the contents of Tristram Shandy were a manifestation of its form, and the novel’s only raison d’être was a display of this formal virtuosity. Contemporary stylistics still speaks in terms of a narrative syntax that gives the impression of a fragmented, broken discourse – hence the famous dashes – without any other unit of measurement besides the book or volume, within which are chapters of hugely varying length. The logical thread is lost in an infinite vortex of parentheses, only to be seized again after numberless twists and turns of Sterne’s acrobatic pen. Sterne has been studied in depth by comparatists, 12

The name parodies Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, which Smollett, in the preface to Roderick Random, quite rightly considers one of the few romances of ancient Greece.

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mainly Italians thanks to Foscolo’s translation of the Sentimental Journey, and has proved of great use in exemplifying this or that epistemological theory of the day. The visual gimmicks no novelist had used before – the hands, the blank pages, the diagrams or graphs meant to represent the form of a chapter, or a gesture – allowed Sterne to be included in the number of those who, conscious of the limitations of language, had felt the ‘expressive frustration of words’. The postmodern too has embraced Tristram Shandy as a landmark of the anti- and meta-novel. § 128. Sterne II: ‘A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy’ There can be no doubt that Sterne’s father was reflected, and not too faintly, in the figure of Uncle Toby. In a brief memoir that Sterne wrote for his daughter (Memoirs), Roger Sterne is described as of ‘a kindly and sweet disposition, void of all design; and so innocent in all his intentions, that he suspected no one; so that you might have cheated him ten times in a day.’ This eccentric, sanguine English soldier, the unlikely grandson of an archbishop, had thrown himself, quixotically, into a vast number of scrapes, and had ended up dying of fever in Jamaica, where he had been despatched to put down a mutiny by the slaves on some plantation. So as a young boy, Sterne had direct experience of military life, until he was sent to relatives in Halifax, near York, to study. He then matriculated in the University of Cambridge, in the very college his great-grandfather had been Master of. These strange mixtures go some way towards explaining his boasting, the eccentricity and the self-indulgent contradictoriness of his personality and his role as a member of the clergy. Besides Tristram,13 Sterne had another alter ego in Parson Yorick, who represents a respectable version of himself as man and priest,14 for priest he was in Sutton from 1738. He later added to this living other stipends and prebends. He became secretary to an uncle who was an arch-deacon, and wrote articles for a York paper supporting Walpole’s administration. But he had no real political fire in him. As a justice of the peace he was strict, but pitied those he sentenced. He was firm in his 13 The letters to Eliza Draper are signed ‘Tristram’. 14 Cf. cut-and-dried Sertoli (SDR, 219 n. 64): ‘Widespread though it be, the idea that Yorick (in Sentimental Journey) is not Sterne […] must be rejected’.

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opposition to Catholics and Methodists, and favoured their deportation from York. As a married man he continued to lead the carefree life of a bachelor; he had his own mother arrested for debt, and was responsible for the bouts of madness in his wife brought on, it would seem, by his numerous affairs. As a young man, long before Tristram, he had written poetry, and published a collection of sermons ‘by Yorick’, which caused no great scandal, and were, indeed, praised by readers. He also wrote a short ‘political romance’ (1759) in mock-heroic, Scriblerian style. In 1762 he was advised to go to Paris following the deterioration of the tuberculosis that had affected him since the late 1730s. On his return from a second journey, by now a celebrity in the fashionable world of London, he met the twentythree-year-old Elizabeth Draper, the unhappy wife of an English merchant in Bombay. He became so infatuated with her that he claimed his old man’s love for her was greater than Swift’s for Stella. The diary he wrote for her was published only in 1904. The account of that second journey to France, and then to Italy, appeared in two volumes in 1768. He had intended two further volumes, but death intervened to prevent the completion of what we know as A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. 2. The Sentimental Journey is, primarily, a parody and ironic overturning of the typical account of the grand tour: all the most minute, insignificant happenings are noted; the autobiographical narrator, here called Yorick, corresponds, in Sterne’s own classification of travellers,15 to a particular variety of the species: he is a ‘sentimental traveller’, attentive to those sights that stir his emotions, his humanity, his eighteenth-century sensibility, as well as his sensuality and, indeed, sexuality (these were aspects that intrigued Foscolo and led to his renowned translation). Rather than in the beauties of nature, Sterne is interested in human beings in all their variety, novelty and unpredictability, so that his book is, above all, ‘a quiet journey

15

The classification of the types of travellers (a parody of philosophic and taxonomic categorization?) in reality serves to destroy the myth of the traveller as such, with special reference to ‘educational journeys’: one can learn more staying at home than by travelling, according to the narrator. Sterne also fires a shot against the literary tradition of the splenetic traveller, who sees everything through bilious eyes.

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of the heart in pursuit of nature.16 The explicit purpose of travelling is the education of the heart, and ‘philosophy’ means the exaltation of human nature; but human nature is forever under attack from ‘culture’ – in other words, egoism and prejudice disguised as reason – and is subject to sudden alteration (‘there is no regular reasoning upon the ebb and flows of our humours’). It also often deteriorates into art, when it becomes artificial and false, instead of authentic and genuine (it is his hunger for authenticity, and the nausea provoked by art that makes Yorick flee the beau monde, and Paris, towards the end of the book).17 Following one’s heart and being true to one’s nature implies a generosity of spirit that justifies human weaknesses and contradictions, and comes dangerously close to sanctioning libertinism and almost indiscriminate sexual promiscuity, with no sense of guilt attached.18 The episodes recounted go from the pathetic to the lubricious and back again, in continuation, with occasional sorties into the outright comic, or a mixture of all three. At Calais, the traveller refuses to give ‘a single sou’ to the begging friar, but peace is made through the exchange of snuff-boxes; the element of pathos is provided by the news of the death of Father Lorenzo. Hindered by Father Lorenzo, Yorick’s natural goodness and generosity find full expression with the beggars of Montriul: even when he has given all the money he possesses, thanks to the ‘powers of nature’ he finds more to give to a beggar who is too ashamed to beg. Yorick is moved when he listens to the story, full of ‘true touches of nature’, of the dead ass, as told by its owner. Between the arrival in Versailles and the 16

17

18

Strangely enough, in the episode of the Opéra Comique, we are told nothing of the performance itself, all Yorick’s attention being focused on the dwarf whose field of vision is obstructed by the gigantic German. Yorick, naturally, takes pity on the dwarf and protests to the German. Yorick’s behaviour is invariably based on feeling and instinct. He is discourteous to the monk because he followed, not his heart, but his instinctive prejudices. The refusal to give alms is explained using a contorted, specious line of argument, and is, in short, a masterpiece of falsehood, as Yorick himself admits to himself straight away. Yorick proudly defends the legitimacy of human feelings, an invention, he insists, not of man but of God Almighty. Consequently, he is vocal in his criticism of the Stoics, who advocate the suppression of all emotion.

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audience with the influential Count in order to obtain a passport, comes yet another pathetic episode – the pâtissier, once a knight of St Louis, now compelled by a reversal of fortune, to sell pâtés in the street, which he does with the same dignity he showed in his former station of life. The last pathetic-sentimental episode involves Maria, a young woman who has been abandoned by her lover and now lives in the woods. Yorick meets her as he heads towards Italy. The traveller’s weakness for a pretty face is evident as soon as he sets foot in France, but in a context that is already coloured by humour: he courts the beautiful Belgian in front of the remise, while the inn-keeper goes looking for the key; the courtship continues inside one of the chaises, but is interrupted at its height by the announcement that her brother is about to arrive. In Paris, this unfulfilled passion torments and disturbs Yorick, but the dramatic turns to comic when La Fleur (the French servant hired by Yorick) is forced to make good, in the eyes of the Belgian beauty, a failing in gallantry and etiquette committed by Yorick when he omits to reply the note she sent him (the remedy consists in one of the many billets doux La Fleur has about him, which is altered accordingly). ‘The small sweet courtesies of life’, the disinterested generosity that is transferred naturally to the senses is exemplified in the glove-maker, of whom Yorick asks directions and with whom he soon is involved in a flirtatious conversation. With child-like ingenuousness, he takes her pulse to measure the rate of her heart beat, and in so doing presses her hand. The appearance of the husband on the scene is brilliantly described, with Yorick overcome by embarrassment and the lady as cool as a cucumber (‘“Twas nobody but her husband”, she said’). To prolong the courtship Yorick decides to buy a pair of gloves, and proceeds to try some on. Needless to say, not a single pair fits. Yorick is moved by the near-empty purse of the fille de chambre (who has, symptomatically, just bought a book entitled Les egarements du cœur), and is attracted, not to say aroused, by her charms. The courtship ends after the trip to Versailles for the passport: the devil tempts Yorick, who candidly admits that in these cases it is better to give in than to get hurt in a fight, so that two end up sitting on the bed in Yorick’s hotel room, and, almost without realizing it, lying down. 3. It would, however, be a mistake to think that the Sentimental Journey contains no descriptions or information on the places visited, and to ignore

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the wealth of observations, often very acute and personal, on France and the French, their customs and traditions, their mentality and national traits. Sterne’s anti-Catholicism emerges clearly in Yorick’s initial sense of repulsion for Father Lorenzo and in the episode of the abbot caught in the act of molestation in the theatre. The most biting satire against hypocrisy and affectation is to be found in the part concerning the hotel owner who protests about Yorick’s putative seduction of a maid in his room, since seamstresses and haberdashers are admitted to the same end, but only in the morning. The vanity of French women is satirized in the episode of the ‘lady-killer beggar’, who never fails to squeeze some offering from the gentle sex. Yorick, who manages to gain access to the beau monde, theorizes that the typical French lady is first of all a flirt, then a deist, and, lastly, devoutly religious. In the brief carousel of types of the society that Yorick for a while frequents there are many examples of real Swiftian farce: in the end, it is all too much for his innate sense of honour, and he decides to leave France and head for Italy. French grandeur is mocked in the description of Paris, where everything is gigantic in scale; the grandeur is also linguistic, and Sterne is constantly at work, reducing and limiting – in short, restoring to language its true relation and proportion to reality. In France, even comparisons and imagery, like those used by the wigmaker in his tart comment (‘you may emerge it […] into the ocean’), are ‘royal’ and ‘imperial’; of the ‘terror [that] is in the word [the Bastille]’ he remarks: ‘The Bastile is but another word for a tower – and a tower is but another word for a house you can’t get out of ’. 4. The Sentimental Journey is, as Yorick himself says, ‘governed by circumstances’; in other words, the logic and time scheme are muddled, the thread of discourse often broken, as in Tristram Shandy19 by pauses for reflection, philosophical musings, exclamations and apostrophes;20 but it is a muddle that is meant to convey the idea of real life. Symptom The text is full of links with Tristram Shandy: Yorick is reminded of Uncle Toby by the sight of an old officer of the French army; his name crops up again in the episode of Maria (a handkerchief belonging to Shandy is returned to Yorick). 20 The anecdote of the notary thrown out of the house by his shrewish wife is told in the page of a newspaper used to wrap Yorick’s breakfast. 19

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and cause of the subtly programmatic structural disorganization are to be found in the fact that it is a kind of epistolary travel book: among the addressees evoked, not really but ideally, are Eliza, Sterne’s amoureuse, and his friend ‘Eugenius’. It is not, then, a slip of the pen if the preface is deferred, presented with all the marks of a rough copy, first draft, jotted note or whatever other kinds of unfinished, unpolished writing one might think of (for example, the preface retains a few personal comments made ‘aloud’, and it is significant that one of the conclusive phrases is picked up by people who have arrived on the scene in the course of the preface itself ). Very often there is no visible dividing line between thought and action, or between a word thought and a word uttered; one imperceptibly becomes the other, as when an inner thought is in fact expressed aloud in the meeting, in front of the remise, between Yorick and the Brussels beauty. The story exudes the scent and bears the signs of the unfinished, and ends with the farcical game of the articles of the treaty stipulated to defend the honour of both himself and the lady from Piedmont, before the two settle down to spend the night together, bedfellows by force majeure. What happened when the terms of the treaty were broken, and how the book itself was meant to end, we shall never know; it is left to us to imagine what part of the lady’s maid’s clothing or person Yorick seizes by mistake when he sticks his hand out of the bed. Suspense, complicity, things left unsaid – these are some of the recurrent devices used to conclude the various chapters. The best example of this is the episode of the seduction of the maidservant in Paris: the attention is focused more on the build-up than the actual seduction, which, once again, is left entirely to the reader’s imagination. The Sentimental Journey is also ruled by associationism and its links, to which are to be attributed both psychological shifts and the concrete events in the plot. The ‘lecture’ by the old officer at the theatre on the theme ‘When in Rome etc.’ reminds Yorick (who is, himself, a Shakespearean association) of Polonius’ admonitory speech to Laertes in Hamlet, and Hamlet in turn reminds him of Shakespeare. So off he runs to buy a copy of his works. Another example is when the threat of imprisonment in the Bastille provokes, by association, the episode of the elegy on the death of the caged bird, with, as an appendix, a condemnation of slavery and a hymn to liberty. The associationist procedure is

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defined as that ‘sweet pliability of man’s spirit’ that leads the Count of Versailles to believe that before him stands Shakespeare’s Yorick (this misunderstanding facilitates the issue of the passport), or that transports Yorick to the time of Beatrix and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing. Through Yorick, Sterne experiments with and theorizes on a kind of shorthand made of imperceptible gestures, fleeting eye-contact, messages left unsaid but picked up by the sense antennae of the other characters (and the reader?). Sterne concentrates almost obsessively on small, intimate movements, fibrillations, unseen alterations of the nervous system communicated through changes in blood pressure and the feel of a hand when grasped; all this brilliantly rendered, I repeat, in the meeting with the Belgian lady at the door of the remise in Calais. What we have here is the stream of consciousness in theatre mode (various personifications, like Avarice, Hypocrisy and Pride battle it out in Yorick’s mind), when Yorick is tempted to offer the lady a place in his coach for the journey to Amiens.21

21

The Eugenius that Yorick addresses with such frequency was a friend of Sterne’s, one John Hall-Stevenson, a book collector with tastes as eccentric as his friend’s. HallStevenson was said to be the author of the best of the many anonymous imitations that appeared immediately after the publication of the Sentimental Journey, under the title of Yorick’s Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy continued by Eugenius. It picks up the story exactly where the original stopped so suddenly, true to Sterne’s style. Eugenius’ story is full of references to Sterne’s text (the flirtatious conversation with the beautiful Madame de L – and with the fille de chambre, the exchange of snuff-boxes with the Franciscan friar, the death of Maria), and some scenes are actually repeated (the visit to the glove-maker, a masterpiece of double-entendre and innuendo that loses much in Eugenius’ version). For anyone not familiar with the original, these scenes would mean little. The narrator imitates Sterne with skill and panache, ready to exploit all the programmatic apertures of the text; but, since he is not Sterne, he often alters for the worse the aesthetic effect and modifies the registers. The anecdotes become exterior to the story, and often take on the tone of the tale of adventure; scurrilous and titillating elements abound, and are more explicit and invasive. The author is clearly trying to fill empty pages, as is particularly evident in the lengthy, almost naturalistic, description of the debauchery and vice of Parisian high society, quite different to the lightness of touch used by Sterne in the original.

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§ 129. Gray* The most classical, bookish, and meticulous of eighteenth-century poets after Pope, Thomas Gray (1716–1771) was born and brought up in an environment that was the least auspicious, not to say hostile to his development into the writer he was to become. Echoes of his infancy reverberated in the mind of the grown man, and ended up by providing material for his poetic world, as well as leaving other, less obvious, traces. Gray’s father was, like Milton’s, a scrivener (a rather vague term indicating something to do with the City and the world of finance), but, unlike Milton Sr, he was violent and unbalanced, given to drink, and with no leaning towards letters or the humanities in general. The Grays lived above a milliner’s shop run by his mother and aunt. In 1735, Gray’s parents separated, though for a while the despotic father forced his wife, by dint of threats, to return to the family home. Though his parents belonged to the merchant class of society, his mother had two brothers, both of whom were Eton scholars. It was they who encouraged the boy, so different to his father, to undertake the study of the classics. At Eton, Gray became friends with Horace Walpole and Richard West, the son of a diplomat; the three, together with a fourth boy, founded a ‘quadruple alliance’, one of those closely knit, slightly unhealthy sodalities typical of public schools and universities at the time. His beloved West died in 1742, leaving Gray heartbroken, as may be evinced from a sonnet written on the occasion (actually one of his worst, most artificial 1

*

Works, ed. E. Gosse, 4 vols, London 1902–1906; Complete Poems, ed. H. W. Starr and J. R. Hendrickson, Oxford 1966, and, ed. R. Lonsdale (with Goldsmith and Collins), London 1969. Correspondence, 3 vols, ed. P. Toynbee and L. Whibley, London 1935. A. S. Cook, Concordance to the English Poems of Thomas Gray, Boston, MA and New York 1908, repr. Gloucester, MA 1967. R. Martin, Essai sur Thomas Gray, London and Paris 1934; W. P. Jones, Thomas Gray, Scholar: The True Tragedy of an EighteenthCentury Gentleman, Cambridge, MA 1937; R. Ketton-Cremer, Thomas Gray: A Biography, Cambridge 1955; M. Golden, Thomas Gray, New York 1964; Twentieth Century Interpretations of Gray’s Elegy, ed. H. W. Starr, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1968; H. Weinfeld, The Poet without a Name: Gray’s ‘Elegy’ and the Problem of History, Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL 1991; S. Kaul, Thomas Gray and Literary Authority: Ideology and Poetic in Eighteenth-Century England, Oxford 1992; F. R. Gleckner, Gray Agonistes: Thomas Gray and Masculine Friendship, Baltimore, MD 1997; B. McCarthy, Thomas Gray: The Progress of a Poet, Madison, WI 1997; R. L. Mack, Thomas Gray: A Life, New Haven, CT and London 2000.

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poems). Thanks to an inheritance, Gray was able to dedicate himself to a life of study at Cambridge, though he never took his degree. His reclusion was interrupted a first time in 1739 when, together with Walpole, he set off in the footsteps of Milton (appropriately, at this juncture, Gray had written more Latin than English poetry) on a tour of France and Italy following almost exactly the various stages of Milton’s itinerary in 1636. The pair separated in Italy, and, making his solitary way back to England, Gray stopped off at the Grande Chartreuse, as Matthew Arnold was to do a century later. Almost no other significant event occurred to disturb a life spent entirely within the walls of his fortress of learning, although he did give signs of restlessness now and then. He turned down the Poet Laureateship in 1757, and went on a tour of Scotland and the north of England, which resulted in a series of descriptive letters so striking and intense as to be included amongst the great examples of English epistolary writing. From 1768 he was professor of modern history but never gave a single lecture; he planned a history of English poetry, which never progressed beyond the draft stage. 2. His father’s death is not mentioned in Gray’s letters, as if he wanted to remove him entirely from his life. On the other hand, the vicissitudes of his family life, and his need for protection found relief and expression in his male friendships, into which he poured, and expected in return, absolute and unconditional devotion. Of course, Gray was by no means the first of the ‘victims’ (he uses the word in his ode on Eton College) of the phenomenon of the ‘particular friendship’, with all its undertones of homosexuality. English literature teems with examples: Spenser and Harvey, Milton and Diodati, Charles and Sebastian in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Gray’s circle referred to each other using ‘pet’ names usually drawn from the classics, like Favonius for West, and communicated by means of a special code full of innuendo. So Gray’s uneventful life was not in fact dead calm: under the surface moved the currents of a neurotic, passionate personality. The most striking manifestation of his troubled psyche is his vindictive touchiness and inability to forgive.1 For some unknown reason, he split with Walpole in Reggio Emilia in 1745; later, they made up, but their friendship was never the same again. His incessant attacks on the ‘proud’ who despise people of 1

In his ‘Hymn to Adversity’, the poet says to the goddess: ‘Teach me to love, and to forgive’.

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humble birth no doubt has much to do with his perceived sense of inferiority in his relations with the son of a Prime Minister. At Cambridge he changed college when some friends played a prank that resulted in a fire breaking out in his room and the Master proved unwilling to listen to his remonstrations. He was more than fifty when he became obsessed with a young Swiss nobleman by the name of Bonstetten, as is shown by his letters. His contemporaries, among whom Johnson, spoke vaguely of his proverbially ‘effeminate’ nature. There have been many psychological and psychoanalytical (mainly Freudian) readings of his poetry, but, as often happens with one-way interpretations, acceptable within limits, the experts find all sorts of complexes, fears and terrors of which the person in question was, in fact, totally unaware. A comparison with Hopkins cries out to be made, based not just on the latent homosexuality, but on a number of parallels and analogies. Gray shares with Hopkins an extreme reluctance to publish his works, though not for religious scruples, as in the case of the author of the ‘Deutschland’. Indeed, religion constitutes the great difference between the two. Both chose a small number of friends as an audience for their poetry: Gray exchanged poems with West, as Hopkins did with Bridges, although Hopkins’s West was Digby Dolben. The guardian and posthumous editor of Gray’s poems was another friend, Mason,2 who was as cavalier with the texts entrusted to him as Bridges was with those of Hopkins. Both poets wrote at length, and in a similar melancholy vein, on the subject of a life lived apart, far from the glare of fame. At times, Hopkins overcomes his despondence thanks to this faith, while Gray leaves us with the nihilistic message that the grave awaits the humble and the proud alike, the faceless few as well as the rich and famous, with no prospect of a life to come, so that he comes across as an agnostic, if not a downright atheist. His Elegy celebrates the same kind of simple, ordinary folk represented by Hopkins in, for example, the blacksmith Felix Randal or Rodríguez the doorkeeper. 2

William Mason (1724–1797), author of two tragedies, one descriptive poem in blank verse of cold, academic elegance, The English Garden, and of Gray’s epigraph in Westminster Abbey. Together with Gray, he disillusioned Walpole as to the authenticity of the poems that Chatterton had presented to the world as written by the medieval monk, Rowley (§ 149).

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Gray wrote little because each poem had to be perfect, and also because his negative, defeatist existentialism demanded, as it were, an even smaller output than that of Hopkins. The resulting corpus is a mix of highly polished completed poems and fragments, of great, imposing odes and short, snappy, humorous pieces, plus the odd occasional poem. 3. Gray the classicist leaned towards the coining of new epithets and phrases that went beyond current poetic diction. He anticipated Mallarmé in this pronouncement: ‘the language of the age is never the language of poetry’. As a poet he is both classical and neoclassical, while his subjects, aspirations and motifs are pre-Romantic, and would be Romantic tout court if they gave at least the impression or illusion of mimesis. He plays a game of ‘come-hither’ with echo-hunters, and had no qualms at defining himself a plagiarist; indeed his poetry is now considered, rightly, to be a mosaic of echoes and borrowings from other poets, which he never acknowledged, save in a few scattered notes. He confessed to those as yet not aware of this tendency, that there were ‘hundreds of more cases’. Johnson of course disagreed: Gray after all was working on a concept of poetic diction that was diametrically opposed to that of the Doctor.3 Gray thought in terms not of a langue set in stone but a parole that was continually being enriched by ‘foreign idioms and their derivatives’, and by other neologisms and coinages. He brought back into fashion the four-line stanza of iambic pentameters, and, above all, the neglected sonnet form, while ignoring completely both blank verse and the heroic couplet. These were all anticipations of things to come, and were to fall on deaf ears in the next fifty years, meeting with a particularly hostile reaction from Johnson, who saw Gray’s poetry as a collection of often quite banal, mediocre thoughts dressed up in the pushy splendour of images of ‘unnatural violence’. It is almost as though Johnson thought of Gray as the last of the Metaphysicals. When it comes to the Elegy, however, Johnson lays down his arms. Ostracism was resumed and redoubled by Wordsworth and Coleridge, while Gray found a kindred soul in Matthew Arnold for the obvious reason that Gray was a student

3

§ 133.5.

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of Celtic and Scandinavian myth, and his poem on Odin is a forerunner of Arnold’s Balder Dead.4 4. Gray’s tripartite canon consists of thirty-three completed poems, eight fragments, and six translations (two from Statius, two from Propertius, the Ugolino episode from Dante, and one from Tasso). Of the completed poems, more than a third were conceived and written in the annus mirabilis of 1742, printed in Walpole’s private printing shop in Strawberry Hill, and published anonymously, in miscellanies, many years later, by Dodsley. Solemn odes of a descriptive and reflective nature alternate with elegies and rare examples of more light-hearted verse. Two imitations of medieval and Scandinavian texts bear a later date. Two of the odes are Pindaric in a more strictly technical sense than is currently understood. As I mentioned, his collected works were published posthumously by William Mason, who took several liberties with the text. The five stanzas of the ‘Ode on the Spring’ present the customary descriptive prelude of elegant but conventional images followed by, not exactly an outburst, but rather a rueful moral reflection.5 The subject is the coming of spring and the re-awakening of human energy and activity conveyed through mythology and personifications. The reawakening, however, is a subdued one, marked by harmonious bird-song; nature returns to life not with a roar but with a whisper that fades to silence. Sights are indeed enjoyed, smells and sounds relished, but only from the security of an isolated, sheltered spot somewhere in the country, in the deepest shadow, where the poet, alone, or at most in the company of his muse, sits meditating and mulling over the very burden of Gray’s poetry in general and this poem in particular: the claustrophobic horror of crowded places, the cult of solitude, and the vade retro addressed to the demon of pride. The apparent euphoria of the opening is always followed in Gray by a disconsolate, self-inflicted lecture on the vanity of all human endeavour:

4 5

Arnold’s ‘Thomas Gray’ is included in Essays in Criticism: Second Series, London 1889, 69–99. ‘Ode on the Pleasure Arising from Vicissitude’ opens with one of the most delightful and exquisite natural scenes in Gray, resembling one of those illuminated in a graceful Cavalier vein, antithetical to the reflective poetry of the early Augustans, though somewhat too stilted, polished, and cold.

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the poet feels he is being mocked by the birds that fly here and there chirruping their happiness as if to spite him. Right from its Menandrian epigraph, the Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College ‘winds its mournful note’: to live is to be unhappy, unhappiness is man’s lot. When he looks back on his college as a grown man, Gray recalls his carefree childhood, and reflects that new generations of schoolboys are now playing on the banks of the Thames. Life brings with it the temptation to go where none have ever gone before. All of a sudden, the poet returns to the innocent schoolboys and the troubles that await them, represented by nightmarish personifications that rise from the page like ghouls. Like Leopardi, Gray can only wish that these future victims should remain as long as possible unaware of what lies ahead. The ‘Hymn to Adversity’ urges adversities to strike the proud, and invokes punishment for them. But at the same time, Gray recites a mea culpa and begs the muse to be generous and speak to him kindly, not to shout at him. Desperately the poet exhorts himself to grow up, confesses, blames himself, and emerges from the terrifying vision of his trial with a few down-to-earth resolutions to do better in the future. ‘Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat’ was written following a suggestion by Walpole, whose cat had drowned in a fish-bowl. The description of the sad event is humorous – the cat sees from the edge of the bowl two ‘genii of the stream’ admiring her, is flattered, leans further over the bowls, loses her balance and drowns – but the moral is serious: beware of temptations. 5. In 1750 Gray sent Walpole his Elegy Written in a Country ChurchYard (written, possibly, in about 1746), which he had spent several years polishing and perfecting, though it numbers no more than 100 lines divided into quatrains with an alternating rhyme scheme. Gray decided to print it because he had been told of the imminent publication of a pirate edition, after the poem had circulated in manuscript among his Cambridge friends.6 If my on-going parallel is accepted, the Elegy occupies the same place in Gray’s poetry as ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ does in Hopkins’s. I have already said that Gray was reluctant to publish the Elegy; the ‘Deutschland’ was regarded with suspicion and remained unpublished, while the Elegy

6

There are two versions, of which the first contains several quatrains later expunged.

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was a huge editorial success, and is the only one of Gray’s poems that everyone agrees in praising, although, like all masterpieces, it has been taken to pieces, examined under a microscope, re-assembled and re-appraised. To tell the truth, some critics, a couple of generations ago, decided it was not, after all, such a great poem, and found all kinds of defects in it, despite the fact that ever since the time of the ‘great Cham’ it has been part of the collective imagination. The poem’s logical structure (the logic is rhapsodic, rhetorical, and, therefore, deliberately overdone) is its strong point, just as in Hopkins: the underlying meaning is that death can be defeated, though Gray lacks the triumphant, apocalyptic certainty that Hopkins finds in his belief in God. The first quatrain of the Elegy proclaims proleptically a natural, and, therefore, cyclical, cessation: a day comes to an end and is followed by night. The quatrain ends with the introduction of an observer, the ‘I’ of the poem, who proceeds to reflect on the implications of the scene before him – nightfall in a country graveyard. The personal involvement lies in the marked prolepsis, acting as objective correlative, of the owl who protests to the moon over the invasion of her solitude. After the prelude, the reader follows the observer among the yews of the graveyard and its inhabitants, each one lying solitary in his or her own narrow grave, never to waken to the call of any external summons.7 As in Hopkins, this dramatic absence of any future prospect, this cutting off of life with no re-awakening or re-birth in some other form, triggers a series of nostalgic reflexions. The internal dialectic shifts to a precise consideration of where the Elegy is set: a graveyard in the country, the burial ground of farming folk who, when alive, worked hard, but joyfully, subduing nature and carrying out vaguely phallic tasks like ploughing and digging. Like the boys on the playing fields of Eton, these rustics were happy because they were ignorant, and this kind of happiness is not to be despised. The heart of Gray’s discourse lies in the opposition between the humble and the proud, or rather, in their equality in death, no matter how different their tombs. Gray suggests that it is possible to be potentially ‘great’ and influential but 7

This reference, albeit in absentia, to the possibility of a Last Judgement, and the line ‘Where heaves the turf in many a mould’ring heap’ recall Donne’s two famous funeral poems.

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to remain undiscovered, in obscurity, because of one’s birth and class, so that one’s talents have no chance to flourish. He illustrates this hypothesis by examples taken from nature and history: among the persons buried in the graveyard, one might have been a statesman, given the chance, another a great poet. The logical consequence is that though they have been denied greatness, they have also been spared the fate of a Macbeth, or any other ‘great’ man whose hands are bathed in blood. However that may be, every death deserves an epigraph, a rough-hewn statue, to testify that the person that lies here was once loved by someone. The grave is a sacred text that admonishes the passer-by how to die well, and reminds him that the dead will be remembered. This is, after all, the only form of salvation offered by Gray, who is not, ultimately, a religious poet. 6. In the course of a long-standing, animated debate, still going on,8 an attempt was made to see in the last six quatrains and the epitaph certain refined stylistic strategies reminiscent of Donne’s poems and the ‘Chinese boxes’ of Wuthering Heights. The gap between the two sections is obvious, the attempt to link them rather forced, and this coda was often criticized as being purely an appliqué. What was postulated was a distinction between the ‘me’ of the fourth line – a conventional first-person narrator representing, at least in part, the poet – and the confusing play of pronouns and identities at the end of the poem. The results of this operation are that the Elegy would appear to be uttered by the poet Gray, but only in so far as he is reading from a manuscript he has found; the ‘poetic voice’ belongs to a ‘spokesman’ who, in turn, introduces three other characters: the stonemason/poet who has engraved the unpolished verses on the headstones of the graves, the elderly clergyman, and another ‘kindred soul’, who arrives on the scene and enquires after the stonemason. Some critics have cleared the board and identified the stonemason/poet as Gray himself, who inserts in the poem, as is normal, an imaginary projection of himself, and writes his own epitaph, describing himself as a rustic poet, charitable, unknown and sentimental. In other words, Gray creates an alternative, more positive, identity for himself, while taking due precautions. Other 8

Cf. Starr 1968, not forgetting that since then the debate has grown and expanded exponentially.

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critics see in the poem a stereotype of the peasant-poet, and point out the discrepancy between this figure and the picture Gray had of himself. What is certain is that the verb tenses are all jumbled up: the stonemason/poet has engraved the headstones, but in a flash-forward he is seen as dead, with some future priest telling a new arrival of the dead man’s last breath. The question remains whether he has composed his own epitaph, or whether this was done by a second stonemason. Those who argue that it is Gray who is speaking lead us into tortuous hypotheses on the date of composition of the poem, the precise moment Gray thought of it, and even the precise geographical location of the graveyard. If the date is 1742, the stonemason/ poet represents West; if the date is 1745, Gray, a Jacobite incognito, or just a sympathizer, was in London when several of the leaders of the 1745 rising were tried and, some of them at least, executed. So there would seem to be a political message to the poem: is it a revolutionary denunciation of the aristocracy? A defence of the working class? Empson was of the opinion9 that Gray, on the contrary, intended to play down contemporary reformist and philanthropic legislation: the poor are rich, only they don’t know it, and Gray is happy with a society divided, immutably, into the rulers and the ruled. Then someone pointed out that the Elegy was translated into French and much admired by the revolutionaries forty years later. Gray is, therefore, ambivalent: the humble emerged unscathed from the bloodbath, but were denied the possibility of expressing their talents. 7. Gray’s two Pindaric odes scrupulously respect the triadic division of strophe, antistrophe and epode. The difficult metrical pattern aside, the poems are allegories representing the destiny and present dire state of poetry. The Progress of Poesy celebrates the healing power of the harmonious verse that flowed in olden days from the Eolian lyre and from the springs of Helicon, but goes on to reiterate the well-worn theme of the translatio studii from ancient Greece to Rome and thence to England. Shakespeare and Milton are portrayed with a Ulyssean nuance as figures who dared to challenge the gods and seize their fire. They are, therefore, in the same category as Gray’s ‘proud’. The Bard commemorates the massacre of Welsh

9

See Starr 1968, 109–10, for the relevant quotation from Some Versions of Pastoral, London 1935.

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poets ordered by Edward I, and praises the Tudors for restoring their ‘race’. The bard’s prophecy ends, however, with a couplet that informs the reader he has committed suicide by jumping off a mountain top. In the final years of his life, Gray became one of the foremost representatives of a growing interest in Celtic and Scandinavian traditions. His two poems on the ‘fatal sisters’, drawn from Eddic mythology, have the urgent, syncopated rhythm of the ballad form, and are, for him, a decided change in register. Odin’s descent to the underworld, presented as a dialogue between the god and the sibyl, Hela, is a triumphant movement conveyed succinctly and effectively. § 130. William Collins* A parallel between Gray and William Collins (1721–1759) was put forward by contemporaries at the end of the eighteenth century, and the putative pairing was taken up and confirmed by the Romantics and, later, by the Victorians. However, opportunism, rather than a real, not a specious affinity lay behind the publication by the OUP in 1918 of a slim volume containing the poems of both, and often reprinted. Comprising little more than 200 pages, the volume is divided into two equal parts, with almost exactly the same number of completed poems (thirty) by each writer and one fragmentary composition. It is true that both Gray and Collins first appeared in Dodsley’s Miscellanies, that they were the most important poets of the 1740s and 1750s, spearheading a revolt against Pope and Augustan poetry in the name of the predominance of the imagination over reason. Beyond this common denominator, however, they have actually very little in common, and it is to be doubted that they ever met. Both were the sons of shopkeepers;1 Gray, a Londoner by birth, lived practically all his *

Poetical Works (with Gray), ed. R. Lonsdale, Oxford 1977; Works, ed. R. Wendorf and C. Ryskamp, Oxford 1979. H. W. Garrod, Collins, Oxford 1928; E. G. Ainsworth, Poor Collins: His Life, His Art, His Influence, Ithaca, NY 1937; F. Rota, William Collins, Padova 1953; M. Pagnini, La poesia di William Collins, Bari 1964; O. F. Sigworth, William Collins, New York 1965; P. L. Carver, The Life of a Poet: A Biographical Sketch of William Collins, London 1967; A. Johnston, The Poetry of William Collins, London 1974; R. Wendorf, William Collins and Eighteenth-Century English Poetry, Minneapolis, MN 1981.

1

Collins’s father was a hatter, but he had also been twice mayor of the city.

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life in Cambridge, and belonged to an exclusive social group; Collins was born in Chichester, but became a Londoner by adoption, and mixed with the likes of the Wartons, James Thomson and Dr Johnson. He went, not to Cambridge, but to Oxford, and, at the age of twenty-four, moved to London, where, ever a dreamer and boaster, he ended up in prison for debt. An unexpected inheritance secured his release. He published his first poems, tried his hand at play-writing, thought of taking holy orders or enlisting, and died before he was forty, cared for by a sister, after spending some time as an inmate of a lunatic asylum. There is, to be sure, no lack of situational and verbal echoes between the two – for reasons of chronology Gray might well be the debtor – but, though they are unmistakable,2 they form part of a reservoir of stereotypes and do not prove any direct exchange between the two. On the other hand, both poets wrote odes to abstract entities. Collins is more suggestive than Gray, but boasts no absolute masterpiece: the ‘Ode to Evening’, his best and most famous poem, is only fifty lines long, and is far inferior to Gray’s Elegy, even in its central, most inspired part. Yet until only a few decades ago, when there was a sudden change in taste, Gray was considered unfit to even tie the laces of Collins,3 who, for two centuries, had been considered his poetic superior. Johnson’s ‘Life of Collins’ is affectionate, personal and very short; he visited him towards the end of his life, and saw that all he possessed was a Bible. This no doubt led Johnson to present him as a victim of fickle fortune, with reference to first his debts and then his madness. However, Johnson is objective: Collins is the kind of poet one may admire, but not love. He found his poetry too weighed down by consonants, which was a way of saying he thought it unmelodious. In later years, the list of Collins’ faults – his use of conventional personifications typical of his time, the rhetorical frills, the mythological apparatus, the grandiloquent apostrophizing and the melodramatic extravagances – has done nothing to lessen his appeal and attractiveness. The circumstances of his early death, and that fact that he

2 3

See, for example, in the ‘Ode to Evening’ and the Elegy the beetle presented in its acoustic dimension, or the anaphora, ‘save where … ’. This opinion of Swinburne’s is reported in Sigworth 1965, 156–7.

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wrote all his poetry before he was thirty added poignancy to the thought of the poet he might have become had he lived. Such is Swinburne’s position, echoed by Saintsbury, who had no hesitation in including various odes by Collins in the treasure-chest of great English poetry of all ages. He added that in Collins there were in fact two poets, one a mere versifier, the other a true bard capable, at times, of moving, conquering, and bewitching the discerning reader. 2. Collins belongs to the neo-Baroque tradition or school of poetry – somewhat paradoxically, since he lived in the age of the aphorism, of a poetry that favoured the terse, cool expression of rational statement. This is no doubt why he appealed to Swinburne, whose style was just as opulent and extravagant. It is also no coincidence that his poetry – in particular, the ‘Ode to Evening’ – was described as being full of ‘heavenly beauty’ by Hopkins, who, in a fit of quite uncharacteristic enthusiasm, wanted to set it to music. The verse form most frequently used by Collins is undoubtedly the apostrophic ode, with, as a unit of metre, a meandering period so full of asides, litotes, adjectival excess, superfluous embellishment and changes in direction, as to end up quite lost in some no-man’s land. Collins’s second voice is heard above all in the three or four elegies (Fidele, as Imogen calls herself in Cymbeline, the heroes of Britain, the poet James Thomson), in which long-winded verbiage is replaced by terseness of style. From his very first works, the four Persian Eclogues (1742), it seems clear that Collins intends to tackle the subject of the English poetic tradition, its crisis and decline, and possible solutions. Conventional admonishments, expressed, appropriately, in couplets, are embedded in exotic situations and represent the beginning of eighteenth-century poetic orientalism (Rasselas had not yet been published). In the first eclogue a wise shepherd warns against the rebelliousness of the flesh, while in the second, evil takes the form of an excessive desire for wealth. In the third, an Abbas Pasha wins the heart of a sweet shepherdess, who reluctantly leaves her familiar world and brings a breath of fresh air to the musty court. In the fourth, two Circassians flee from the invading Turks and the devastation of the Tartar hordes. The most interesting innovations are the visionary flashes that punctuate the narrations. Collins was to become the most responsive, of all the English poets, to the diaphanous effects of painters like Raphael, Reni or, later, Corot.

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The camel-driver of the second eclogue fears a hostile, dangerous nature in the form of the wild animals (lions, tigers, asps, snakes) whose tracks he comes across. The two Circassian fugitives display all the psychological symptoms of people on the run, and all around them, scenes of destruction presage the apocalypse. In the epistle to Hanmer (1743–1744), the editor of Shakespeare, Collins laments the demise of the theatre after Shakespeare, and suggests new modes of interaction among sister arts, particularly painting and poetry. The Shakespeare that must rise again is not so much the purveyor of a moral message as the creator of witches, fairies, everything magic, surreal and monstrous, like storms at sea or on the heath. Collins disagrees with Dryden’s and Pope’s theories of the steady evolution of the arts: he believes that they do not describe a continuous, gradual crescendo; in fact, he says, Shakespeare was followed by a stasis, or rather, by regression. The cameos of Antony when he uncovers Caesar’s body, and Coriolanus with his mother, are brilliant paraphrases of the original. 3. The twelve odes written in 1746 by Collins were meant to be published along with those by Joseph Warton, but the two poets ended up by publishing their works separately. Those by Collins made no immediate impact, and the poet burned the numerous unsold copies in a fit of embittered defiance. Warton’s preface to his own poems is, however, a shared manifesto that decreed the end of didacticism and moralism in poetry and a revaluation of the role of the imagination. So Collins’s odes are metapoetic, in that they deal with the essence and elements of tragic poetry. This was the ideal pursued by the author, and a genre that he aimed to analyse and investigate as a theoretician by translating Aristotle’s Poetics (an ambitious project which was probably never even begun). These objectives are personified in the figures of goddesses or muses, to whom the poet offers praise and adoration. Poetry, says Collins, springs from visions that are not always soothing, but dark and even demonic. He is well aware that in an age of reason – unlike the time of Tasso – this necessitates a suspension of disbelief. The idea of poetry as an expression of the demonic runs through the ‘Ode to Terror’, in particular: it is terror, rather than fear; terror unleashed by monsters, hobgoblins and ghouls, so that the ode, scrupulously divided into its Pindaric triads, is also a kind of dance of death. Collins excels in synthesizing a drama, or the climax of a

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play, as seen in his evocation of scenes from Euripides and Sophocles. In the ode of the same name, the ‘poetic character’ is identified in mythopoeic energy and imagination. The springs that watered tradition have all dried up, and yet the fire of imagination burns on even as it denounces the loss. So this is really an ode ‘on Imagination’, that harks back to the Spenserian episode of Florimel, just as it paraphrases Milton’s account of the Creation. It transforms it into a union between the Creator and the imagination that prefigures poetic conception, that is to say, the formation of the demiurge poet who, by creating, repeats the ecstatic experience. The complementary function of poetry is to convey messages of progress and liberty, and, in fact, an ode ‘to Liberty’ traces the journey of English freedom from its distant origins to the present day. ‘Ode to Evening’ is a ‘sensibility poem’, and a reformulation of the well-worn subject of the evening as a bringer of peace and rest. After an initial section that meanders excessively the poet dreams he is drawing near a lake lit up by the dying rays of the sun; or maybe he is sheltering in a mountain hut from which he can enjoy the gossamer vision of the mist-shrouded countryside around him. This is the best example of the veiled ‘Collins effect’, romantically suggestive, and reminiscent of the Keats of the ‘magic casements’. Gray, too, wrote similar country scenes, but his are refined, while those by Collins glow with the magic of mystery and the unknown. The ode on ‘the popular superstitions of the Highlands’, perhaps inspired by the 1745 rebellion that inflamed the Tory intelligentsia, was written some time between 1749 and 1750, but published only in 1788, in the form of a verse epistle addressed to a Scottish playwright, whom Collins advises to seek inspiration in local traditions. On one hand, Collins declares he too desires to follow these traditions, but doubts the feasibility of such an option in an age so averse to superstition; on the other, he urges the Scots to be Scots, and recognize the enormous value of their traditions, at the very time they were emigrating in mass to the south and leaving behind them their ethnic identity. Significantly, Collins mentions Drummond of Hawthornden, himself a ‘fugitive’ from Scotland, associating him, naturally, with Jonson, whom we in turn might link with Johnson, author-to-be of a Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides and particularly insensitive to the charms of ‘North Britain’.

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§ 131. Churchill The development of a kind of poetry independent of contingencies, freed from the shackles of the epigram, descriptive rather than satirical or moralizing, and based on the imagination, was anything but straightforward, and Charles Churchill (1732–1764) is only the most famous of the late representatives of Augustanism – a survivor, one might say, and as bitter as Swift or Pope, and, according to some, the greatest satirist to appear between the author of the Rape and Byron. It is a fact that Churchill possesses, in small quantities, the brutal frankness and spurious sloppiness that are typical of Byron (who indirectly acknowledged a certain empathy with Churchill when he was one of the few to dedicate commemorative verses to him in 1816), or of Samuel Butler, in the Hudibrastic variant that takes the place of the standard heroic couplet employed by Dryden and Pope. Churchill’s satire is rooted in the political arena, and, consequently, his favourite theme is that very Grub Street so often the target of his predecessors. His poetry was an integral part of his battle fought alongside the radical, John Wilkes, that filled the pages of the Whig North Briton (almost entirely written by Churchill), a paper particularly hostile to Pitt’s successor, Lord Bute. Most of the poems of this prolific writer were written and published in the space of four years (according to some, shortly before his death in 1764). The first edition of his collected works, published in 1866,1 contained a detailed comment on persons and events mentioned in the poems, by then lost in oblivion. In his day, Churchill was admired, and, above all, feared, because he was formidable both in attack and defence, and would give back double what he took. In one of his poems he targets ‘a Pomposo’, probably referring to Dr Johnson, who had expressed reservations on Churchill, according to Boswell, though he added that Churchill was like an apple tree that produces a huge number of crab apples – but it would be better for such a tree to produce few fruits. Churchill was unanimously credited with a lot of nerve but no manners, and T. S. Eliot thought him capable of the occasional fine line, but not of a whole masterpiece.

1

The Poetical Works of Charles Churchill, ed. J. L. Hannay, with notes by W. Tooke, London 1866.

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2. The son of a clergyman, who was also a headmaster, Churchill enrolled in the University of Cambridge, but attended no lectures, as he chose, or was compelled, to get married at the age of eighteen (he left his wife in 1761 and married his mistress). Giving in to his father’s wishes, he became a priest – and a curate – as well as a teacher in a school for young ladies. Never actually defrocked, he abandoned himself to a life of pleasure, and piled up debts that were underwritten, in a sense, by a former teacher of his. In the end, his parishioners demanded that he be removed from his post. Rumours began to circulate about his unseemly, blasphemous antics, like shouting a toast from the top of the bell-tower; he was whispered to belong to the infamous ‘Medmenham monks’, a group of aristocrats who performed satanic rituals in the abbey of that name. He died of a fever, at the age of thirty-three, in Boulogne, where he had gone to meet up with Wilkes, who was on the run. His poetry was both a natural expression of his personality and a means of making money – he had a wife and two children to feed. His first satires caused a sensation because they attacked and defamed the Chapter of Westminster, in other words, the Church itself. The proceeds from the sales of The Rosciad (1761) were enormous. This direct attack on the acting profession – only Garrick was spared – is reminiscent, in its vitriolic destructiveness, of the Dunciad, which is echoed in the title to begin with. Mean, venomous portraits are painted of his victims, seen as ciphers of stupidity and mediocrity. Smollett joined the fray but was silenced by Churchill’s retort (The Apology), and Garrick wrote, begging him not to be too cruel. Subsequently, he fired a broadside at Hogarth, who had satirized Wilkes. The latter was defended in The Duellist (1764), in Hudibrastic metre, and in The Candidate. The Prophecy of Famine (1763) is an attack on Lord Bute and the new political administration. The Gotham2 (1764) is a long, verbose poem whose only element of interest is that it is not satirical, or not directly so, and is a detailed description of a utopian state ruled by an ideal monarch, who is, of course, Charles Churchill himself.

2

The title probably refers to a proverbial town, whose inhabitants were notoriously stupid.

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§ 132. Johnson* I: Rise and fall of the artist as creator It has become customary to begin any discussion of Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) by stating that whoever wishes to write on or talk about Shakespeare or seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English poetry must be familiar with his edition of Shakespeare’s plays (1765), with particular 1

*

Works, ed. A. Chalmers, 11 vols, Oxford 1825, to be replaced by The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, scheduled to appear in 24 vols, ed. A. T. Hazen and J. H. Middendorf, New Haven, CT 1958–. Letters, ed. R. W. Chapman, Oxford 1952, and ed. B. Redford, 5 vols, Princeton, NJ 1992–1994. The Dictionary is available in CD-Rom, ed. A. McDermott. A Concordance to the Poems of Samuel Johnson, ed. H. H. Naugle, Ithaca, NY and London 1973. Rasselas principe di Abissinia is a translation by G. Miglietta; the excellent introduction in three parts, copious notes, and an extensive bibliography, all by G. Sertoli, Venezia 2005, is reprinted in SDR, 173–96. Life. J. Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., now ed. G. B. Hill and L. F. Powell, 6 vols, Oxford 1934–1964; J. L. Clifford, Young Sam Johnson, New York 1955, and Dictionary Johnson: Samuel Johnson’s Middle Years, New York 1979; O. M. Brack, Jr, and R. E. Kelley, The Early Biographies of Samuel Johnson, Iowa City 1974; J. Wain, Samuel Johnson, New York 1975; W. J. Bate, Samuel Johnson, New York 1977; T. Kaminski, The Early Career of Samuel Johnson, New York 1987; R. DeMaria, The Life of Samuel Johnson: A Critical Biography, Oxford 1993; L. Lipking, Samuel Johnson, Cambridge, MA and London 1998; G. Manganelli, Vita di Samuel Johnson, ed. V. Papetti, Roma 2002 (four radio conversations recorded in 1964); D. Nokes, Samuel Johnson: A Life, London 2009; N. Hudson, A Political Biography of Samuel Johnson, London 2013. Criticism. S. C. Roberts, Samuel Johnson, London 1935; W. K. Wimsatt, The Prose Style of Samuel Johnson, New Haven, CT 1941; J. W. Krutch, Samuel Johnson, New York 1944, London 1948; J. Hagstrum, Samuel Johnson’s Literary Criticism, Minneapolis, MN 1952; I. Jack, ‘‘‘Tragical Satire”: The Vanity of Human Wishes’, in Augustan Satire, Oxford 1952, 135–45; W. J. Bate, The Achievement of Samuel Johnson, New York 1955; M. Joyce, Samuel Johnson, London 1955; D. J. Greene, The Politics of Samuel Johnson, New Haven, CT 1960, and Athens, GA 1990, Samuel Johnson, Boston, MA 1970 and 1989, and, as editor, Samuel Johnson: A Collection of Critical Essays, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1965; T. S. Eliot, ‘Johnson as Critic and Poet’, in On Poetry and Poets, New York 1961, 184–222, and ‘Poetry in the Eighteenth Century’, in PGU, vol. IV, 271–7; R. Voitle, Samuel Johnson the Moralist, Cambridge, MA 1961; CRHE, ed. J. T. Boulton, London 1971, 1995; P. Fussell, Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing, New York 1971; R. B. Schwartz, Samuel Johnson and the

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reference to the preface and the notes to the individual plays, and with his Lives of the Poets, completed in 1781; while no one interested in the history of lexicography can ignore his Dictionary of the English language, completed in 1755. Of course, whatever Johnson did was generally met by a barrage of criticism and objections, but this has done nothing to diminish the respect owed to him in historical terms, because, as Johnson himself reminds us, ‘all judgement is comparative’ (Rasselas, XXX). The literary historian must at this point invite Johnson to leave his seat on the bench and take his place in the dock, and, no longer a critic, to be judged as an author. I use a judicial metaphor advisedly, as, once the clouds of incense had cleared, Johnson was accused by many of being a great conversationalist, rather than an actual writer, whose undoubted genius had produced no tangible fruits in the sense of creative literature. A third consequence, or repercussion, lies in the symbiosis between Johnson and Boswell, and might suggest that, of the two, the real writer is the biographer, who, from the material provided by his subject, moulds his own autonomous creation. Boswell’s Life of Johnson is, paradoxically, Johnson’s greatest work, and has, through the centuries, provided enjoyment and food for thought for generations of readers. Johnson was competent, indeed gifted, in assessing writers who were much better at creative writing than him – a failure as a dramatist, a merely promising poet, and a mediocre novelist, if Rasselas can

New Science, Madison, WI 1971; C. McIntosh, The Choice of Life: Samuel Johnson and the World of Fiction, New Haven, CT 1973; T. M. Curley, Samuel Johnson and the Age of Travel, Athens, GA 1976; L. Damrosch, The Uses of Johnson’s Criticism, Charlottesville, VA 1976; W. Edinger, Samuel Johnson and Poetic Style, Chicago, IL 1977; R. Folkenflik, Samuel Johnson, Biographer, Ithaca, NY 1978; J. P. Hardy, Samuel Johnson: A Critical Study, London 1979; C. E. Pierce, Jr, The Religious Life of Samuel Johnson, London 1983; N. Hudson, Samuel Johnson and Eighteenth Century Thought, Oxford 1988, and Samuel Johnson and the Making of Modern England, Oxford 2003; A. B. Kernan, Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Printing, Princeton, NJ 1989; T. Woodman, A Preface to Johnson, London 1993; J. Cannon, Samuel Johnson and the Politics of Hanoverian England, Oxford 1994; P. Rogers, Johnson and Boswell, Oxford 1995; The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, ed. G. Clingham, Cambridge 1997; R. DeMaria, Jr, Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading, Baltimore, MD 2009; Samuel Johnson in Context, ed. J. Lynch, Cambridge 2014.

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be called a novel at all. He excels in incidental, or complementary genres, like literary criticism, philology and biography, and therefore is difficult to place in any history of literature limited to creative writing. 2. Johnson’s career presents a visible caesura in 1759, the year Rasselas was published: until then, he had tried to establish himself as a poet, or, in general, as a creative writer; now, he turned critic, and of a particular kind:1 the written work of the philologist, editor, lexicographer and literary historian were matched by his oral production as a master of the art of conversation, carefully transcribed by Boswell in his Life, which is largely a catalogue of Johnson’s pronouncements on the literary and political life of his day. Johnson became what in modern terms might be styled the ‘media intellectual’, the encyclopaedic popularizer, with a ‘ready-to-go’ opinion on anything from Aristotle to the Zulus. The caesura is more marked when we consider that the early Johnson was a pessimist dedicated to pillorying the men and manners of his day with an acrimony worthy of Swift himself, and that after 1759 he seemed to have a change of heart, even becoming, one might venture, charitable. This is what Johnson himself says of his ‘conversion’, according to Boswell: ‘For some years, I was totally indifferent to religion. This was very early in my life. Sickness made me rediscover it, and I trust I have never since lost sight of it’. One workable metaphor might be that at first Johnson shunned the society of his fellow men, although he still needed someone to communicate with; then, he decides to accept what he cannot change, and gets on with what he has to do.2 Various halfhidden clues point to a negative existentialist who externalizes his neuroses, but can find no way out of them. His goal was London, and he became an honorary Londoner, although he was proud of his provincial roots. He was, as I have said, at first a poet and then an essayist; first deeply troubled, and then more hopeful. The closing lines of The Vanity of Human Wishes herald a new-found peace of mind. A key to the anxiety – the Angst – that tormented the younger Johnson is the verb ‘prey’, which recurs 1 2

His career seems to fall quite naturally into three phases: in the first he is a moralist, lexicographer and journalist; in the second, he receives a pension of three hundred pounds; in the third he becomes the ‘Great Cham’ of literature. As he lay dying, he dismissed the countryside as a ‘mental prison’.

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numberless times in both Boswell’s Life and in the writings of the man himself; a Pinter-like syndrome of a psyche under siege at the very heart of the eighteenth century. His interest in various kinds of imprisonment is almost pathological, hence a compulsive urge to escape to freedom. In this light, it seems significant that his first noteworthy sortie into prose was on the ‘outsider’, Richard Savage. In his youth, Johnson was of a solitary and thoughtful temperament, and often taken to be a hypochondriac, though his very real medical condition was probably caused by poverty and its consequences. Several anecdotes regarding his life are almost surrealistic. The son of a bookseller in Lichfield, at the age of three he was taken to an audience with Queen Anne in the hope that the ‘royal touch’ might cure the scrofula that had already made him half-blind in one eye.3 When he was twelve, while looking for some apples in the house, he discovered instead an edition of Petrarch, which he proceeded to devour; he knew Macrobius by heart, and planned to publish Politian in Latin. All his life he was a formidable eater, even of less than fresh food, and a drinker of tea and wine in Pantagruelian quantities, until he was induced to moderation. For fourteen months he was a student at Oxford, but was forced by straitened circumstances to abandon his studies. He set up a school, which foundered almost immediately; he married a widow twenty years older than himself. He made up his mind to attempt a career in the literary world, and, with his pupil David Garrick in tow, arrived in London, where, thanks to his robust physique, he was at first mistaken for a porter looking for work. He never succeeded in becoming quite ‘normal’: no great friend of soap and water, he changed his linen as little as possible, never cleaned his nails4 or polished his boots, and, when by now an elderly man of sixty, gave refuge in his house in Gough Square to a failed surgeon, a blind governess and a black manservant. His youthful neuroses were replaced by a constructive pessimism, or at least by a suspensive optimism, in which his various tensions were kept under temporary control, ready to explode once more, as indicated by the closing pages of Rasselas, as soon as the search for truth 3 4

This ritual was abolished by George I in 1714 as part of a Kulturkampf against miracles. Boswell continues: ‘not only did he pare his nails to the quick; but scraped the joints of his fingers with a penknife, until they seemed quite red and raw’.

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ceases and acclimatization takes over. Johnson lived in fear of going mad, and gave Mrs Thrale a padlock and chain to be used to secure him if his seizures were particularly bad. When he went behind the scenes at the theatre he would say that the actresses’ white breasts and silk stockings aroused his ‘amorous propensities’.5 In 1762 the king awarded him a pension of 300 pounds, allowing him to lie back and regale his fellow-countrymen with reassuring messages in the form of maxims aimed at consolidating the stability and security of the middle class.6 He wrote nothing more of a bitter, incendiary nature, but concentrated on making money to satisfy his craving for fine food and social prestige. One is justified in being surprised and, perhaps, disappointed by his cynical aside: ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money’. 3. When he arrived in London in 1737, Johnson had in his pocket the first three acts of Irene, a tragedy, which, once completed, was performed, thanks to some string-pulling by Garrick, at the Drury Lane Theatre, where it ran for nine nights. Critics have always ignored this albeit limited success, and have spoken of the play as an embarrassing mistake, and a sure sign of Johnson’s incompatibility with writing for the stage; and he himself disowned it when in his prime.7 It tells the story of the sultan, Mahomet, who tries to convert to the Muslim faith Irene, a beautiful Greek Christian captured during the siege of Constantinople. She falls a victim to false rumours and is killed after being accused of treason. It was common practice for beginners in the literary field to try to make money by writing for the newspapers, the only market that was thriving at the time. From 1740 to 1743 Johnson wrote political articles, or rather, parliamentary parodies for Edward Cave’s The Gentleman’s Magazine, inventing ‘parliamentary 5 6

7

Boswell completely overlooks Johnson’s sexual appetites, which were alluded to in part by John Hawkins, one of his numerous other biographers. Johnson wrote four political pamphlets of some interest: The Patriot (1774) (but only after saying, famously, that ‘patriotism is the last resort of a scoundrel’); The False Alarm (1770), defending the decision to bar the radical, John Wilkes, from the House of Commons; Thoughts on the Late Transactions Respecting Falkland’s Islands (1771); Taxation No Tyranny (1775), in answer to the deliberations of the American Congress. Greene 1960, 66–7, is one of the few critics with anything good to say on it.

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addresses’ (of the so-called ‘senate of Magna Lilliputia’), that could not be published without incurring legal consequences.8 Johnson’s poetic output consists of two long satires plus a number of largely insignificant translations and adaptations from the classics. The two long works are defined as ‘imitations’ of Juvenal, his third satire, and the famous tenth, translated by numerous other English poets. The eighteenth-century imitation requires great skill in transposing classical contents to the contemporary world and making them relevant. In this, Johnson rivals Pope and even Dryden. One is a re-elaboration or enhancement of the other: the limited scenario of the first poem is replaced by a wider range of reference; there is a shift from a synchronic to a diachronic vision, though the basic concepts and objectives remain the same. London (1738) describes the departure of someone called Thales from London to Wales. The satirical element lies almost entirely in bitter complaints about the current state of affairs, accompanied by the classic nostalgia for the morality of bygone days and now much diminished martial temper of the English people. The fiercely anti-French prejudice was to become a recurring feature in Johnson’s work as a critic and philologist: he castigated ‘Frenchification’ as an indication of the decline of the English language. In fact, the word and concept of ‘declining’ suggests a Gibbonian sequence of rise, decline and fall of this or that nation or empire. In Thales, Johnson rejects the idea of settling in the capital (perhaps he had soon been disappointed by the city), and formulates the ideal of the poet as a wandering demiurge, which includes the personal myth of the fugitive, without home or country. The identity of Thales is not clear, but seeing that Democritus is cited and quoted in The Vanity of Human Wishes (1748) it seems likely that the reference is to the Greek philosopher of the same name, whose wisdom was proverbial, rather than to Savage (in any case, Johnson had not yet made his acquaintance). The Vanity is generally considered to represent the pinnacle of Johnson’s poetic achievement, given its occasional bursts of magniloquence. The abrupt caesura at line 99 might suggest that bribery and corruption began under Henry VIII; in reality, it is the king who curbs and crushes these evils, while Archbishop Wolsey 8

His version of Lobo’s Abyssinian travels is ‘an adaptation rather than a proper translation’ (SDR, 173 n. 2).

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is seen as the prime example of domination by a lust for power. The brief portrait of Wolsey is followed by others of renowned condottieri (Charles XII of Sweden, Xerxes) who aimed too high, and whose overweening pride is inevitably punished by defeat, and in some cases, madness. It is hard not to see, in these casus virorum illustrium, a personal reference to a tormented renunciation of all aspirations to greatness. No human achievement can satisfy the ambitions of some; the important thing is not to despair, and, bowing humbly to Heaven’s will, to carry on. In his 1744 Life of Richard Savage – poet, author of tragedies, comedies, pamphlets and panegyrics, and, all in all, a kind of literary buccaneer9 – Johnson recounted what he was silent about in his autobiographical utterances. Writing Life of Savage was a catharsis: Johnson completed it in one sitting, sat back, and, we might imagine, breathed a sigh of relief. 4. Rasselas (1759) was, along with Beckford’s Vathek, England’s introduction to the fabled East, represented by the Arabian Nights. It was written in a week, in order to pay for the funeral of his mother, who had just died,10 and is based on Johnson’s own translation, from the French, of a travel book by a Portuguese Jesuit. It is a transposition, in about thirty short chapters (some less than a page long), of the theme of The Vanity of Human Wishes. Its didactic intent is to disillusion those who think that happiness can be achieved in this world, and that what is denied us today may be given tomorrow. The starting point is the bizarre decision (borne out by anthropological observation) by an Abyssinian tyrant to ‘imprison’ his children in a palace situated in an impenetrable valley until 9

10

Savage, at first a shoemaker, became a writer out of necessity; he then was employed by a patron as penniless as himself. He got into a fight, wounded (killed?) one of those involved, and was arrested, tried and imprisoned. His mother sabotaged his application for a royal pardon. Released on probation, a small pension allowed him to live for a while in relative peace and quiet. However, he quarrelled with his new benefactor, and slipped into a life of excesses. He became practically a pauper, and was helped out by friends who organized a collection for him. Despite all this, he was arrested for debt and ended up in Newgate. Recent biographers have come up with a different hypothesis, positing a less cynical need (cf. Woodman 1993, 28), though they confirm the existence of a controversial, or specifically psychoanalytical, relationship.

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the heir apparent succeeds to his father on the throne. The only access to this gilded prison is ‘a cavern that passed under a rock, of which it has long been disputed whether it was the work of nature or of human industry’. It is quite evident that this palace of delights is Kubla Khan’s ‘stately pleasure dome’ without the underground rivers. It also recalls, for those familiar with Homer and Tennyson, the lotus-eaters, who, sickened by a life of cloying pleasures, decide to shake off their hedonistic lethargy. Rasselas, a restless, moody investigator of the meaning of life, has had enough of this Eden or Eldorado turned prison, and decides to escape, accompanied by the ‘poet’, Imlac, his own sister, Nekayah, and her maid, Pekuah. The parenthesis or prolepsis of the ‘mechanic artist’ is an example of the almost light-hearted satire to be found throughout the story: the ‘artist’ in question makes himself a pair of wings, and attempts to fly; like Icarus, he fails and plummets (into a life-saving lake, however). The episode owes much to Swift’s ‘projectors’ in the Academy of Laputa. Later, an astronomer11 who believes he has superhuman powers, is dashed from his pedestal exemplifying the undisguised manifestation of his madness. In Imlac’s long preparatory tale it is clearly Johnson speaking (though he also uses Rasselas as mouthpiece): the message is the futility of all attempts to find happiness, and the vanity of all earthly things. Imlac concludes his account by saying, or thinking, that although in all his wandering he has not found happiness, and he is now resigned to living in the valley, yet he has pleasant memories to help him through life. He knows from experience that the happiness Rasselas is looking for can never be found, but he does nothing to stand in the way of his search, as Rasselas must discover for himself the truth that Imlac has learned from all his years of roaming: desire is never sated however much it is fed. This ‘tale within a tale’ of Imlac’s rings with echoes of Gulliver: Imlac has travelled to many countries and learned their languages, which has enabled him to converse with the inhabitants about the local beliefs and customs. Lilliput is not far. Johnson’s aesthetic ideas are anticipated in the famous aphorism, that poetry ‘must disregard present laws and opinions, and rise to general and transcendental truths’. Once on their journey, the 11

The ‘airy notions’ that tyrannize the human mind recall the ‘airy good’ in Vanity, l. 10.

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four fugitives discover, to their cost, that human actions are entirely governed by greed and selfishness. The story becomes one long list of shattered illusions, as in the case of the rationalist philosopher who loses his mind when his daughter dies. Many questions pertaining to happiness are debated in forerunners of the ‘conversation piece’. Marriage is a frequent subject of these discussions, and always emerges as something of a madcap venture that usually ends in tears, but yet is still to be preferred to celibacy. The visit to the pyramids of Egypt reads like something from a travel book, and is a literal prophecy of the admonishment purveyed by Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’. The episode ends with the abduction of Pekuah, as if to show that curiosity is often dangerous, and the system of the pashas is congenitally corrupt, since it proves impossible to organize a hunt for the Arab kidnappers. The abduction itself can be seen as yet another parody, this time of the medieval romances involving Arab Muslims and Christians. The parody, to work, obviously required an audience that was ‘in the know’. The last scene takes place before the catacombs: a punctilious disquisition leads to a statement of the themes that underpin the graveyard poetry of Young and Blair – our earthly journey is short, so we need to prepare ourselves for the life to come. The conclusion appears hurried and ambiguous; choices and objectives are compared, that everyone knows will never be met. The reader is left adrift, while the Nile rises and floods the low-lying lands. § 133. Johnson II: The three monuments to knowledge The transformation referred to above, from biting satirist and fustigator of Augustan vices, to conventional moralist and mild-mannered objectionist, in fact precedes Rasselas, and had been in preparation for at least a decade. Johnson, following in the footsteps of Addison, took on the role of eclectic educator in the three periodicals he created or collaborated with: The Rambler (1750–1752), The Adventurer (1753) and The Idler (1758–1760). The more than 300 essays by his hand – lay sermons on a variety of subjects, from great to small – are in themselves pleasing pseudo-philosophical exercises, though at times excessively long, that exploit Addison’s use of masks and related mock-heroic stories, like those of his look-alike Sober and the foppish Minim. Johnson’s new role as a

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universal sage entailed abandoning his pessimistic vision of the degeneration of the human race, and choosing, instead, to express confidence in the new generation. Despite all its drawbacks, civilization is much to be preferred over primitive society; but, as in Rasselas, desire is seen as futile, and literary fame, in fact any kind of fame, as ephemeral. A very Solomon in his impartiality, he weighs up the pros and cons on the subject of the day, imparts his blessing on the new genre, the novel, as long as it has a moralizing message, and, championing marriage as a fundamental pillar of society, lays down the criteria for its correct functioning. An indication of the direction Johnson was taking is to be found in a number of surprising engagements undertaken in the 1740s: he collaborated in the cataloguing of the Harleian Library, and edited the resulting eight volumes (1744–1746). After writing several short biographies, or entries, for a medical dictionary, he laid out a proposal in 1745 for a new edition of Shakespeare. The following year he signed a contract for a dictionary of the English language. At the time, the concept of a history of poetry did not yet exist, much less a history of literature (‘poetry’ included drama, the novel was just taking off ) from the beginnings (left out, and we shall see why) to the present day. Johnson was now turning his attention towards activities that were, one might say, subservient to creative writing and aimed at providing the tools and background knowledge necessary for an adequate understanding and appreciation of mid-eighteenth-century civilization. The ‘three monuments’ were huge encyclopaedic compilations of national achievements in literature, and retrospective assessments of the whole of English culture. 2. These three great undertakings were actually carried out with exasperating slowness compared with the speed with which Johnson composed and wrote as a young man. Deadlines for completion were never met, quite understandably, given the immensity of the task in hand (it should be remembered that Johnson seldom made use of collaborators, but did everything single-handedly). He was also a prey to increasing laziness, which he passed off as circumspection and scholarly caution, and his working days were considerably shortened by the claims of notoriety, which Johnson, far from shunning, actually courted. The one-time misanthropist had turned into a kind of socialite, a personage who attended ‘at homes’

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and had become a connoisseur of good food and refined pastimes.12 The public figure of ‘Doctor Johnson’ was largely a construction of Boswell, whom he met in 1762. Other friends included a group of admirers led by the Thrales, a rich brewer and his well-read, flirtatious wife. On the death of her husband, Mrs Thrale married Gabriel Piozzi, an Italian music teacher, much to the chagrin of Johnson himself, who had a similar interest in the ‘merry widow’.13 The literary ‘Club’ was founded in 1764 on the suggestion of the painter, Reynolds, and numbered among its members Garrick, Burke, Goldsmith and Bishop Percy. In his Life, Boswell gives a catalogue of Johnson’s pronouncements on a whole range of subjects, many of which are simply examples of the very ‘wit’ – fanciful and metaphysical – that he criticized in the ‘old poets’. At this stage in his career, Johnson had become, in the words of a visitor, ‘a kind of publick oracle’. He made the most of his reputation as an authority that could never be openly contradicted and was, in turn, expected to be ready with the kind of weighty opinion that would resolve this or that question once and for all. This state of affairs agreed with him so much that it would be true to say that he was always on the look-out for new ears; it was not others who looked for him; he never pretended that he wasn’t in need of more listeners. He cherished detachment, and would address even the by now close friend, Boswell, as ‘Sir’. The second part of Boswell’s Life ends up, ironically, by turning into a dictionary of abstract and concrete cases on which the good Doctor would inevitably be called to pronounce his verdict, like Jesus importuned by the Pharisees; but Johnson, too, was skilled in the art of turning tables on those who attempted to fox him with trick questions. This is the impression, at least: in reality, one gradually begins to suspect that the Johnson of the Life is an invention of Boswell’s, or, at least, a transformation of the actual man

12

13

A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), in short chapters in diary form, is a kaleidoscopic account of an excursion with Boswell in the autumn of 1773 to parts of the country then considered to be a kind of Thule. It is the only non-critical, and non-political work by Johnson, with the exception of Rasselas. Mrs Piozzi wrote a book of entertaining and informative anecdotes (1786).

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from Lichfield, reduced by means of ironic erosion,14 into a kind of ‘fool’ in the Elizabethan sense. He becomes a jongleur who entertains the dinner table with jests and witty jokes, striking paradoxes and put-down lines, but also at times seems unsure of himself, lost, floundering in an attempt to keep afloat in his sea of prejudice and specious argument. So, Boswell’s biography is also an involuntary dethroning of the Cham, and the pitiless exposure of the Weltanschauung of a mediocre Philistine intellect with some fairly petty fixations; a far cry from Carlyle’s ‘hero as man of letters’. Johnson had a number of obsessions: for example, he was unsparing in his criticism of the Scots, or of the American ‘colonists’, for that matter. Boswell, himself a Scot, took it all without blinking, aware that this was the roar of a gentle giant. At this point, Johnson’s famous religious feeling might be seen as hypocritical, a whitened sepulchre, devoid of true, authentic belief and conviction. The fact of the matter is that he was conservative by nature, and distrusted mysticism and religious ‘enthusiasm’; he belonged to no Church or sect, and yet said his prayers morning and night, and observed the teachings of the Bible. Politically, he and his family were supporters of the Stuarts, but loyal to the House of Hanover. The only subject on which he changed his mind was slavery, and this was duly taken up by the Romantics. Taine considered his stock of passive truths to be obvious, and Hazlitt affirmed he was readier to seize the whole than the constituent parts, and that he was therefore obvious, obtuse, and specialized in commonplaces. By nature, Johnson was curious, at least, and would often repeat his advice not to spend one’s life poring over books; as Valéry was to say, il faut tenter de vivre. Of course, a critic must keep abreast of developments in his field, otherwise he falls behind, and his judgements lose their cutting edge and efficacy.15 In fact, his close friends could not understand how Johnson found the time to read and keep up to date. The answer is, Johnson unashamedly admitted he never read a book from cover

14 15

Boswell’s aside on Garrick’s lack of talent is explicit: ‘This was most fallacious reasoning. I was SURE, for once, that I had the best side of the argument’. His knowledge of French was limited, and of Italian, even more so, leading Baretti to remark that ‘he spoke neither of them’.

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to cover in his life: he skimmed and scanned, reading a page here and there. This, he said, was sufficient to give an acceptable idea of the whole work. 3. Commissioned and started in 1747, scheduled to take three years to finish, believed by most to be an impossible task, the Dictionary of the English Language was completed, single-handedly, in 1755. Ever since 1604, there had been dictionaries aimed at increasing vocabulary, and including difficult or unusual words, neologisms, and technical terms. In his Dictionary, Johnson gave 40,000 headwords, with pronunciation and definition. The revolutionary element was the inclusion of quotations from literary texts exemplifying the meaning and use of the word in question. Tommaseo and Littré were to follow in his footsteps, but similar projects were usually the work of teams rather than individuals, like the King James Bible in England, or the Académie dictionary in France.16 Johnson’s dictionary not only served to standardize a language that, at the time, was still in a state of flux, but soon was read for enjoyment as well as for its usefulness: the arbitrariness, prejudices, the colourful, often biting, humour of his definitions (see the entries for ‘lexicographer’, ‘taxes’ or ‘pension’) have contributed to its status as a ‘readable’ book. The ideas behind Johnson as lexicographer, philologist and critic are interrelated. In the preface to the Dictionary, Johnson presents his guiding criteria, which are similar to those behind his edition of Shakespeare: first of all, language is an anthropomorphic organism, which is born, grows, and dies; in other words, it evolves and develops unceasingly. It is impossible to halt this process: language cannot be mummified. Yet, this very process is a bastardization, which requires purification. It is, perhaps, not very surprising that two apparently dissimilar writers like Johnson and Ruskin use the same image of the fallen woman with reference to, in Ruskin’s case, Venice, and in Johnson’s, the English language, including the language of literature.17 The examples given by Johnson are not pre-Elizabethan, since he believed that English had been ‘bastardized’ by the insertion of foreign, especially French, words.

16 17

He received the substantial sum of £ 1,575 for an enterprise that, then as today, enriched the publisher more than the author. The letter in which Johnson spurns Lord Chesterfield’s tardy congratulations is famous. Greene 1960, 21, points to a Calvinist trace in Johnson on his mother’s side.

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His exhaustive and discerning overview of the dynamic nature of language ends with an attack on translators who ‘Frenchify’ English: ‘tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to degeneration’. 4. Johnson’s intention to produce a new edition of Shakespeare’s plays was announced in a declaration of intent in 1756; when it finally came out in 1765 it consisted of the three canonical divisions of preface, text and annotations. The ‘proposal’ formulates the objectives which will be reiterated in the preface. Two adjectives are used repeatedly to identify the cases in which the editor/philologist is called to intervene: ‘corrupt’, in a textual sense, and ‘obscure’. In reality, these terms imply a wide range of meanings that go from the programmatic to the subliminal. Correcting a corrupt reading often meant continuing the fight against everything wrong with the age – everything decadent, dirty, rotten, or tainted; obscurity was the ideological adversary of the Enlightenment, whose task it is to defeat the forces of darkness. Analogously, in an age in which the writer had not yet become a conscious and conscientious defender of his rights as an author, Shakespeare began the chain of diffusion of the artistic product and its launch on the market, but immediately abandoned it to its fate. Johnson uses time and again the term ‘depravation’ with reference to a play, which, like a loose woman, sallies out into the streets and sells herself. So, the play must be ‘saved’, literally. The preface is closely written, essential, to the point and well-structured. It argues that Shakespeare, the poet of reality – in other words, of nature – reveals the general laws of human behaviour and psychology. His plays, therefore, are not about gods or heroes, but men and women; his kings are not sacred, but ordinary, flawed human beings. Shakespeare describes life as a mix of comedy and tragedy, but was more at home in the world of comedy. Johnson’s aesthetics derive from Horace, or perhaps he simply values the utile above the dulce; in his eyes, Shakespeare often wished to amuse instead of teach, did not enforce poetic justice, and is guilty of numerous technical shortcomings and infringements of the rules of verisimilitude. As to the vexata quaestio of the unities, Johnson applies an early case of estrangement, and shares it with the audience, who are awake to the fact that they are spectators of an imaginary event taking place somewhere else. The entire Elizabethan period was seen by the Enlightenment as an age of barbarity; to use another anthropomorphic analogy, nations, like individuals, go through a stage of infancy. On textual matters, Johnson can

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afford to comment scornfully on the work of his predecessors. However, both as a philologist and a critic of Shakespeare, he was immediately consigned to history, to use a euphemism. Nor has posterity been much kinder. Macaulay found his scholarship amateurish: Johnson, he said, did not possess the necessary grounding in the works of the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists. Furthermore, he judged his textual criticism to be debatable and inaccurate. 5. Twenty-two of the literary biographies of The Lives of the English Poets were published in 1779, the other thirty in 1781. The original plan, agreed on by Johnson and a group of London booksellers at Easter 1779, was for an anthology of English poetry accompanied by introductions. The only modification to the original plan requested by Johnson was the inclusion of certain poets that had at first been excluded. The introductions grew in length, breadth and depth, and were republished separately from the anthology itself, becoming one of the great classics of English criticism and an essential reference point for scholars.18 Lives of the Poets stands out because it is not the dusty work of a haunter of libraries and archives. It makes good reading precisely because it is not scholarly. Johnson never had many books at hand when he wrote, and gleaned information from acquaintances and eye-witnesses, or relied on his prodigious memory. So it seems natural when he admits that his presentation of certain poets is based on distant, dim recollections of things read years before. The exclusion of Chaucer, Spenser and Crashaw might raise an eyebrow or two, but can be explained, not only in terms of unfamiliarity. This editorial initiative, in fact, photographed the English poetic canon as it stood in the year 1777, and confirms the optimistic vision of progress championed by Dryden and Pope, which showed that English poetry had reached its height in the eighteenth century, and was in no danger of declining. Johnson’s test of aesthetic excellence is disarming in its simplicity: poetry must unite pleasure and truth, placing imagination at the service of reason, with an implicit condemnation of verbal trickery and rhetorical legerdemain. The first biography, that of Cowley, clears the deck of possible future misunderstandings and states Johnson’s opinion of Metaphysical poetry.19 Obviously 18 19

Obviously, the present writer, too, has often used Johnson as a starting point when dealing with poets included in the Lives. Volume 1, § 73.3 and 75.2 and n. 30.

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Johnson’s strictures are retrogressive, since Cowley was the last exponent of a school that began long before. The term ‘depravation’ appears both as catachresis and metaphor. Johnson often ends a ‘Life’ with an evaluation of his subject’s contribution to the progress of poetry – how much he has added to it, and how original he has been, taking into account that the eighteenth century was largely an ‘age of imitation’ as far was poetry was concerned. § 134. Boswell Paradoxically, we must put Johnson to one side when we consider Boswell’s Life of Johnson independently of its instrumental value, and set about reconstructing the figure of this author of numerous works of the imagination that show him to be superior to his renowned master (creative writing, as we have seen, was not Johnson’s forte). A comparison between Boswell’s The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. and Johnson’s own A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland is instructive in this light. Boswell’s writings reflect his wild, reckless life, full of enthusiasm and adventure, marked by a predilection for women that might well be considered a form of sex addiction, and enigmatic psychological manifestations that have made him an equally if not more interesting case than Dr Johnson himself.1 Of his masterpiece, published in 1791, it was objected that he could have known next to nothing of the first half on Johnson’s life, since he only met him in 1763 (on 16 May), when Johnson was fifty-four. Furthermore, it was calculated that, in the whole twenty-one years of their friendship, Boswell was actually in direct contact with Johnson for only 270 days – less than a year. Another criticism refers to the excessive length of the work, much of which is nothing more than a series of questions and answers. Marcel Schwob regretted that Boswell had not thought fit to cut it right down to about ten pages! On reading, however, we see that Boswell is a very canny organizer, or, we might say, an expert interviewer, who takes 1 Praz (PSL, 374–7) gives a truly inspired portrait of the man, perhaps because two of his favourites, Lytton Strachey and Marcel Schwob, had also written on Boswell. One swears that terms and phrases used in this presentation would reappear in other writings by Praz, as indeed they do.

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great care in the preparation of questions to put to his interviewee. For a narcissist like Boswell, it counts as a great success if he is able to fade into the background and not vie with his subject. Johnson was prodded and primed, and out came the flood of words, opinions, diktats and decrees. I have said that Johnson being interrogated is like Jesus before the Pharisees: to continue in evangelical mode, Boswell, like the writers of the Gospels, has been suspected of not referring the ipsissima verba of his protagonist. How could he? He made notes of conversation, not there and then, but later. His is an account not of superhuman feats, but of the little things of everyday routine, and the life and singularities of an ordinary man. 2. In 1763, Boswell was twenty-three (thirty-one years younger than Johnson), and in search of a father-figure. Johnson fitted the bill. Boswell felt the need of moral support in order to negotiate the chaos of his world full of fears and doubts. He had other putative fathers besides Johnson: Rousseau, Voltaire, the Corsican general, Pasquale Paoli. So eventful was his life that it seems impossible to fit so much into the first twenty-five years of existence. He was the son of a dour Scottish lord, who forced him into the study of law and the legal profession. However, he thought only of literature and politics (his mother was a devout Calvinist, like that of Archie, the son of the stern judge in Stevenson’s Weir of Hermiston). His diaries were thought to have been burnt when he died; they had, instead, been kept under lock and key by his descendants because of their scandalous contents, and were only published in the early twentieth century.2 They reveal a master of terse, striking prose and considerable dramatic flair, as well as an ante litteram Decadent, who took literally the Metaphysical conjunction of body and spirit, and the harmonious co-existence of sexuality and spirituality. He was converted to Catholicism, and at one point thought of entering a monastery. In the end he reverted to his libertine ways. He married in 1769, but became no wiser for it. Like Don Giovanni, he built up an unending catalogue of victims of his attentions – from noblewomen to milkmaids, from Scotland to the Mediterranean, and like the Don, his

2

Published in chronological order from 1956 in New York.

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desire for sex turned into a sickness. During a trip to Europe in 1766, he struck up a friendship with Pasquale Paoli who had led an unsuccessful uprising in Corsica. With Boswell’s help, Paoli took refuge in England and settled in London. An Account of Corsica appeared in 1768, followed by several open letters on the subject, through which Boswell tried to secure British support for the movement for Corsican independence. A historical curiosity: Paoli’s lieutenant was the father of Napoleon Bonaparte; had Britain imposed her protectorate on a free Corsica, Napoleon would have been born a British subject … § 135. Wilkes, Junius In the second half of the eighteenth century, anyone could undertake a political career and become famous overnight on the strength of a speech before the House. The speeches of some of these orators were published and are extant. Though the contingent circumstances have long since faded, the words live on, such is the excellence of some, not all, of them. The verbal fencing begun in Parliament continued in the columns of newspapers that sprang up like mushrooms and disappeared just as quickly for a variety of reasons, amongst which the demise of one or both of the combatants. The anti-government radical, John Wilkes (1725–1797), often mentioned in this book, had such a turbulent, busy, colourful career one might expect to see at any moment a re-born Defoe rise up and write a memoir on him. In Hogarth’s portrait, ugly and cross-eyed, an anti-clerical, satanic sex-addict,1 he founded the North Briton in 1762,2 and used it to attack systematically both the king and his government. Actual defamation was avoided until the famous issue no. 45, in which Wilkes accused the king of lying in his speech on the Treaty of Paris. There followed a suit for libel, which induced Wilkes to flee overseas. However, he soon returned in search of prestigious positions: he became alderman and then Lord Mayor of London. The main points of his political programme were the abolition of ‘rotten boroughs’,

1 2

He, possibly like Churchill, was one of the ‘Medmenham monks’ (131.1). It responded to Smollett’s The Briton (§ 126.1 n. 7), therefore anti-Bute.

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the extension of suffrage, and Habeas Corpus for parliamentary crimes. He supported the American colonists in their fight against the mother country and was one of the inspirers of the Boston tea-party. His only fault was to advocate bloody repression of the Gordon Riots in the 1780s. Dr Johnson could not distinguish between the refined, articulate man of genius and his questionable morals and revolutionary ideas. For his part, Wilkes split public opinion into enthusiastic supporters and vociferous adversaries. For his many detractors, amongst whom most Victorians, he was a rascal and a demagogue. 2. Wilkes’s actually writings are of secondary importance. Not so the letters of his supporters and defender, Junius, published in the Public Advertiser from January 1769 to early 1772, and signed with this or other classicalsounding pseudonyms. The whole corpus of letters was first published in 1777, and subsequently added to and reprinted up to 1850 and beyond. The real identity of ‘Junius’ is still a mystery, but authoritative scholars (and handwriting analyses) point to a certain Irishman by the name of Philip Francis, a diplomat and functionary at the War Office.3 The name he chose was significant, since the model of public virtue is the tetragon, austere Roman stoicism now about to disappear before the rising fire of Romanticism. The influence of the classics is evident in the clear, balanced eloquence of the style, which makes great use of figures of rhetorical ‘ethos’ to attack, in the name of liberty and the public weal, the personages and practices of government, especially the Duke of Grafton, who had taken Chatham’s place as Prime Minister in 1768. A group of ‘right-minded’ conservatives, headed by Johnson, appeared to appreciate the stringency of the writing while in fact taking issue with the contents. He was ostracized by the Victorians, who found in him all the flaws of a partisan, malicious personality without a single virtue; not even the classical poise and balance of the style served to attenuate their verdict. He was compared with Burke and found lacking. Joyce sees him as a milestone in the development of English prose, though 3

See SAI, 647, for other possible candidates to date, to add to the pre-existing forty or fifty. Junius has proved supremely skilful in keeping his real identity secret up to the present day. Byron dedicated several stanzas to him (lxxiv–lxxxiv) in The Vision of Judgment – underlining his protean, shifting character.

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his positive opinion of Junius may derive from the fact that behind the pseudonym lurked, as I have already said, an Irishman. Of course, Joyce was also familiar with the Irish tradition of eloquence and forensic skill, as seen in the seventh episode of Ulysses, set in the offices of the Freeman newspaper. Junius is echoed in Ulysses in one of the sixty passages exemplifying English prose from the Latinate origins of the ancient chronicles to the final segment in contemporary slang used in the fourteenth episode of the Hospital. In a single page Joyce succeeds in concentrating all the tics and marks of the eighteenth-century polemicist, including the climax of the interrogative clauses. After which, Junius is forgotten. Today he is just a name. § 136. Letter-writers The almost legendary beauty of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689– 1762), maiden name Mary Pierrepont, and her sharp, piercing intellect, have never lacked male admirers. Recent criticism, however, mainly feminist, has raised her to the level of a truly complete writer – a poet, novelist, essayist, polemicist, an all-round intellectual in short, rather than just a letter writer, albeit one who furnished incomparable insights into the social and cultural life of the mid-eighteenth century. Her essays and poems have been revalued along with her contribution, aided by Mary Astell, towards a self-aware, fully conscious feminist movement. The reassessment of her importance has been the result of intense work done on the corpus, unsatisfactorily published in 1802 and enriched by recent additions and new discoveries, like an early prose and verse romance in the manner of Aphra Behn published in 2000, an epistolary novel in five letters, and a Princess Docile (published in 1996), a new idea, announced as revolutionary, of a novel that actually anticipates the SF genre.1 A diary of hers, probably of enormous significance, was destroyed by her daughter, and the extant letters are, in all likelihood, only a small portion of a stereophonic and quadriphonic flow, skilfully modifying tone and key according to the addressee. 2. At the age of twenty-three, Mary Pierrepont, the daughter of a wealthy Whig nobleman, married the Honourable Edward Wortley 1 In Romance Writings, ed. I. Grundy, New York 1996, who has also edited, or re-edited, various other texts.

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Montagu against her father’s wishes. In her letters, this prequel of Richardson’s Clarissa is emphasized. Once settled in London, she began writing, publishing and debating on equal terms with the great Augustans of the 1720s. In 1716 husband and wife moved to Constantinople, where Wortley Montagu had been appointed ambassador. The first, and most famous, set of letters (also called the ‘embassy letters’) refer to Turkey. She had become, in a short time, familiar with the uses and customs of the country, and had even learnt the language. She immersed herself enthusiastically in Turkish culture, and provided a groundbreaking synchronic and diachronic analysis of the European scenario up to its borders with the Middle East. They constitute the first rhapsodic digressions – in loco – on the theme of dolce far niente that was to capture the imagination of the English until Joyce’s Bloom and beyond. On her return to England in 1718, she campaigned for vaccination against smallpox, which had left her with a disfigured face. Montagu flirted with Pope, teasing him, but in the end making fun of him, leading to deep mutual hatred between the two. She virtually separated from her husband, and, in 1739, once again took the road of exile towards France and Italy (the lake of Iseo, Brescia and Venice), where she lived until 1761. She fell in love with Count Francesco Algarotti, an Italian illuminist, and would willingly have gone to live with him, but was unable to overcome his cold reserve. Equally disappointing was her infatuation with another Italian, the despicable Brescian count, Palazzi. She died of cancer soon after her return to London. The ‘Italian’ letters to her daughter, who had married the Prime Minister, Lord Bute, are her swan-song, and are dedicated to the relationship between mother and daughter, and other educational questions. 3. Letters to His Son by Philip Dormer Stanhope (1694–1773), better known as the fourth Earl of Chesterfield, or Lord Chesterfield, addressed to his five-year-old illegitimate son in 1737, were published posthumously in 1774. A second series of letters to an adopted son (a distant cousin), also called Philip Stanhope, was published only in 1890. Both books have become popular, especially the first, because they embody late eighteenth-century ethics and rules of behaviour. Another reason for their lasting success is that, beneath the stiff, formal style, and the didactic motivation, can be felt the anxiety and worry of a father, fearful for his child’s future and career;

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the man of state becomes just a man. Stanhope, who had had a Huguenot tutor, was a star student at Cambridge, though he did not graduate. He went to live in France and won the applause of the courtiers for his speed in acquiring the manners of a gentleman. He was elected to Parliament while still very young, and, on the death of his father, inherited the title in 1726. He began a brilliant diplomatic career, at the conclusion of which he was reputed to be one of the most exceptional statesmen and public servants of the century. In 1728 he was ambassador in the Hague, but returned to England to join the parliamentary opposition to Walpole and the Excise Bill. He also wrote, and signed, letters to the newspapers criticizing the king, George II. In 1745 he was appointed lord lieutenant of Ireland, and in only eight months distinguished himself for his policies based on a humane version of Illuminism, which was tolerant towards Catholics, and aimed at favouring the development of industry and subsidies for the poor. When he returned to England, he became secretary of state, favoured the reform of the calendar, and was elected to the House of Lords. He retired from political life in 1755, when he realized he was going deaf, and accepted the decline of his physical powers with stoicism. A fanatic of etiquette, the paragon of refined behaviour, and a living textbook of savoir faire, he accepted the little ironies of life with a smile. During his time in Holland he had an affair with a governess, which resulted in the birth of the illegitimate son to whom the first series of letters is addressed. Officially, Stanhope married a countess who was an illegitimate daughter of George I, from whom he had no children. When his illegitimate child died, Stanhope was unaware that he had been married and was the father of two children. He took care of his two grandchildren, but the letters were published by his daughter-inlaw in revenge for having received a miserly inheritance. It is to this act of spitefulness that we owe the survival of the letters, which, anyway, proved to be ineffective: the illegitimate son remained a bumpkin, and the adopted son grew up ungrateful and ill-mannered. Stanhope committed his greatest blunder with Dr Johnson:2 his tardy approval of the Dictionary provoked Johnson’s famous statement on the dignity of the artist. To synthesize, the 2

§ 133.3 n. 16.

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two collections of letters repeat from beginning to end the lesson that worldly success comes before scruples. This is not an apology or incitement to vice, only a kind of neo-Machiavellian compromise or mental reservation. It is a parody of the kind of handbook the Elizabethans loved, modelled on Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (ahi quam mutatus!). Johnson returned to the attack with a damning verdict (‘the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing master’), ignoring Chesterfield’s courage in attempting to free himself from the grip of the English form of Illuminism, and turn instead to its European counterpart. His reputation was familiar to Dickens, who in Barnaby Rudge turns him into Sir John Chester, ‘an unprincipled blackguard’; only Thackeray was more charitable, making one of his descendants, Major Pendennis, an arbiter of taste. 4. Quite different, because devoid of all human context, are the letters deriving from scientific annotations, collected in the Natural History of Selborne (1789) by the scientist, Gilbert White (1720–1793), written and sent from the Hampshire village of Selborne and addressed to two correspondents. Enlivened by a series of curious, loving, but often absurd investigations, they are a minutely scrupulous record of the morphology and behaviour of birds. Darwin and natural selection have been mentioned in connection with some of White’s hypotheses and queries that are raised here, but then left without answers. The careful observation of the natural world brings to mind Hopkins, or Edward Thomas. § 137. Hume The philosophy of David Hume (1711–1776) has always been found preoccupying and perplexing, sometimes spreading panic among historians, who usually begin any discourse by saying, apocalyptically, that, with Hume, philosophy can be said to have reached point zero, the point of no return, the last bell, or, to change the metaphor, to have gone bust: Reason has completed its task of finding out the truth, and now submits, apparently, to hara-kiri and surrenders, handcuffed, to her executioner. What is worse, so to say, is that, having got rid of Reason – the pride of the Enlightenment – Hume embraces solutions of ‘irrationalistic extremism’, which are the negation of the very essence of Illuminism: ‘Reason’, he says, ‘is, and must be, the slave of passions’. Similarly, in a kind of nuclear

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fission, Reason, or its absence, voids the subsidiary branches of philosophy, ethics, politics, and religion. According to Bertrand Russell, writing in 1946, Hume’s challenge to the philosophy of the future had not yet been taken up and won.1 The Treatise of Human Nature, published in three volumes in 1740, is his masterpiece, although he wrote it when he was not yet thirty. He expected, by publishing it, to cause quite a stir in the world of philosophy, but nothing happened, so he spent the next fifteen years pinpointing, commenting, clarifying and shortening the various sections. The following year, he published fifteen moral and political essays; then, in 1748, 1751 and 1752, re-elaborations of his Treatise and the Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, which awoke Kant from his dogmatic slumbers.2 In 1757 he published four ‘dissertations’, and with them practically concluded his activity as a philosopher. His dialogues on natural religion were published posthumously, according to his wishes. For Hume, philosophy equals psychology, because knowledge derives from the study of the intellect and its working. Knowledge derives completely from perception, and gives rise to impressions and ideas, the only difference between the two being that the latter are less vivid and marked; impressions are felt, ideas are thought; impressions come first, ideas come later. This order cannot be inverted. In reality, Hume demotes the rational function dear to philosophers to a ‘bundle’ of perceptions, with this implicitly eliminating the equation of reason equals soul. Hume’s thesis is basically that causativity in natural phenomena is merely a question of ‘custom’ of our imagination, or, rather, a ‘belief ’. That is to say, the need for causation lies in the mind and not in the objects themselves. This belief, valid for the past, may not be relevant in any given future, or indeed from one moment to the next. Only probability authorizes us to expect the repetition of a link between two phenomena, A and B, as expressed bluntly in the following epigram: ‘If we believe that fire warms, or water refreshes, ’tis is only because it costs us too much pains (sic) to think otherwise’. Now, Hume himself was a critic of his own philosophy. As, in part, in the case of Kant, Hume is the kind 1 2

HWP, 637. In Russell’s opinion (HWP, 646), neither Kant nor Hegel really answered Hume, as they represented a kind of ‘pre-Humian’ rationalism.

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of philosopher who lets back in through the window what he has put out through the door. He sets the cat among the pigeons, and then raises his eyes and starts to whistle; but he pays for the dead pigeons, too. He does not destroy his carefully constructed castle of ideas, but he makes it subservient. A true empiricist, he cannot deny or downplay human history and mental habits, whatever their causes. Common sense has the better of his radical scepticism. In other words, he was sceptical about his scepticism, and after a series of exclusions and eliminations, he accepted and condoned traditional ways of thinking. Morals refer to the feeling of disinterested pleasure arising from virtue, and displeasure resulting from vice. As social animals, we are naturally attracted to one another. In political philosophy, Hume reaches out to Adam Smith, and prepares the way for Bentham. The state is the result not of a social contract, but of a natural feeling of solidarity among men in order to satisfy complex needs. In the matter of religion, Hume appears to be a true Lucretian or Epicurean, and rejects the deist argument according to which the order of the world presupposes a divine architect. Even if God does not show himself, everyone believes in him anyway: religion is a human reaction, and therefore a recognized phenomenon. It should not be forgotten that, as an epistemologist, Hume repeatedly attributes the formation of impressions to unknown causes. 2. The correct chronological order of the three ‘facets’ of Hume reads thus: historian, essayist, philosopher. These activities are independent of one another, and exactly successive. A fourth activity binds them all together, however: that of the man of letters. In a short memoir written a few months before his death, Hume made the surprising revelation that, at a very early age he had been seized by a great love of literature, and this passion had accompanied him throughout his life and was responsible for every pleasure he had ever experienced. The passion, however, was passive, not active, and desultory, since his bibliography consists entirely of works on philosophy, apart from a History of England in six volumes (1754–1761), a landmark in its genre. As often happens with philosophers, the love of literature is manifested in the medium employed to put forward his arguments – a prose that is a pleasure to read, clear, sometimes ironic, always polished. As a writer Hume is far superior to Locke, who uses language only as a necessary tool, and is inferior only to Berkeley. Born in Edinburgh, the son

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of a landowner, he studied law and then went into commerce. He moved to France, and for three years (1734–1737) lived in La Flèche, the town of Descartes. There he started working on his Treatise, which appeared in 1740. He applied, unsuccessfully, for a chair at Edinburgh, and accepted diplomatic missions on the Continent. From 1763 to 1766 he lived in Paris, and was made much of by the Encyclopaedists. He returned to England, bringing with him Rousseau, who, notoriously affected by an obsession syndrome, believed Hume was organizing a plot against him: they quarrelled loudly and publicly. In 1751 he had been appointed librarian at the Law Library of Edinburgh, and so had access to a vast collection of original documents, necessary, though not in themselves sufficient, for the preparation of a history of England as written by a philosopher, and a Humian philosopher at that: that is, based on the axiomatic belief that the human reaction to any given stimulus is the same at all times. He began his history with James I and the institution of constitutional monarchy in England, when Parliament had succeeded in limiting and bringing to heel the power in the hands of the king. As a historian, Hume is a son of the Enlightenment, if only because he sees political institutions as always evolving, from barbarism, through autocracy and on to the sharing of power. The first two volumes reach 1688; at great request, he proceeded to write two more on the Tudors, and added two more on the vast period from Julius Caesar to Henry VIII. Much criticized, and even accused of inaccuracy, this history by Hume has, however, the distinction of being the first of its kind. § 138. Robertson The increase in historiographical activity at the end of the eighteenth century was due, among other factors, to market demand: histories sold better than novels or poetry, and guaranteed rich proceeds from research which was not as demanding as it was to become in the future. William Robertson (1721–1793), a Presbyterian minister and Chancellor of the University of Edinburgh, which under him reached its moment of greatest splendour, was the second in time of the three great Scottish historians of his day, but the third in worth. He wrote four main works: a history of Scotland, published in 1759, focusing on the most glorious and legendary half-century (the life of Mary Stuart); one on the period of Charles

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V (1769); one on America, with a section on the landing of Columbus often praised as ‘charming’ (1777); an excursus on the exploration of India (1791). He is credited with having an evolutionary, progressive, and therefore philosophical concept of history; the downside is his acceptance of a number of eighteenth-century prejudices, like the dismissal of the Middle Ages as a period of barbarism, and, above all, a fiercely anti-Catholic Presbyterianism. Robertson was, logically, against all possible collusion with Scottish Jacobitism, though he claimed to be a Moderate,1 and went so far as to play down the revolutionary elements in his histories. The notoriety of his books outside Scotland gave him lasting prestige far beyond their real worth. They were translated into French and admired by Voltaire, and continued to be read and appreciated well into the nineteenth century, as proved by the fact that Taine always inserts him into his lists of memorable prose writers of the eighteenth century. Catherine the Great sent him a gold snuff box, and used to travel with a copy of his works by her side. Even Gibbon admitted that reading Robertson was a more stimulating experience than leafing through Hume, who almost invited the reader to lay the book down. His prose is often described as clear and pleasing, but these are euphemisms for the quite monotonous style of an unexceptional intellect; and nowadays he is mentioned just for the record. Saintsbury was lapidary: most late eighteenth-century histories are worthless, apart from Gibbon. § 139. Gibbon Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) is the epitome of the one-book man. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire eclipses everything else he wrote, which is, in truth, not much, quite understandably given the time and effort that went into the Decline, perhaps the most famous and best loved history in the English language – not just a history, either, but a masterpiece of style, and a work of literature in its own right. The idea of the Decline came to Gibbon all of a sudden; his road to Tarsus was the ruins of the Capitol in Rome; the time, one day in the year 1764. This vision of his future work fuelled the flame of his ambition and talent, until then 1

He belonged to a group of intellectuals (Blair and Hume were also members) who had chosen the call themselves ‘Moderates’.

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a mere flicker. When he went up to Oxford in 1752, at the age of fifteen, Gibbon was already an omnivorous reader, encyclopaedic in his knowledge, and an expert in religious discussion. He spent fourteen ‘wasted’ months at the university, where thanks to his tutor, the theologian, William Law,1 he became interested in Catholicism. He had already turned to several Protestant monks in order to learn and be listened to, but found no great satisfaction in what they had to offer, and was converted by a Jesuit. His father reacted by packing him off to Lausanne, to stay with a Calvinist minister. Gibbon not only returned meekly to the Protestant fold (this is similar to what happened to Marvell),2 but in the five years he was there he practically became an agnostic. On an intellectual plane, his stay in Switzerland gave him direct access to the French classics mentioned in the Encyclopédie, and a perfect command of French. On the personal level, he fell in love with and was loved by the future mother of Madame de Staël, but was unable to marry her because of the opposition of his father. One of Gibbon’s first works was an essay, written in 1761, in French, on the by now passé subject dear to the Augustans, the querelle between the Ancients and Moderns. It seems natural that Gibbon should side with the Ancients, linking literature to the social and political context, especially in the case of Virgil, whose work was to be seen as a function of the politics of Augustus. Gibbon, therefore, was already contemplating a magnum opus, in this rather like Milton, who had tried out various genres and subjects before deciding on what was to become Paradise Lost. In 1764 he had thought of, but then rejected, a history of the Swiss Confederation, a life of Sir Walter Ralegh, and a history of Florence under the Medici, in which he intended to deal at length with Savonarola and the ‘enthusiasm’ he aroused, later used as a weapon by the enemies of the Medici dynasty. Had Gibbon actually written this history, George Eliot’s Romola would not have seen the light, or would be quite different. For many years, he left untouched the idea he had had in the Forum in Rome. Before 1776, he had been a captain in the militia, a member of Johnson’s Club,3 and a 1 2 3

§ 103. § 25.3. § 133.2.

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member of Parliament. After 1783 he lived for ten years in Lausanne, and returned to England, only to die there quite unexpectedly.4 2. The six volumes of the Decline appeared at irregular intervals between 1776 and 1788; there are seventy-one chapters in all, numbered without interruption: 1,300 years of history are surveyed, from 180 AD to the fall of Byzantium; the centre of gravity of the work is the first part up to the year 641. As in certain symphonies, the main motif is introduced immediately, without prelude or introduction: ‘In the second century of the Christian Era, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind’. As a historian, Gibbon is inductive rather than deductive, and therefore does not present a set of general principles or preconceived historiographical theories: he draws conclusions according to the events narrated. However, in nuce, that opening statement contains one of the fundamental deductions he had been working on through the years: the Roman Empire of the second century was at the height of its development, and had nowhere to go but down; the area it occupied was the most beautiful on earth, and its degree of civilization knew no equal. At the end of the paragraph Gibbon declares that the death of Marcus Aurelius marks the beginning of the decline and fall of the ‘prosperous state’ of the empire. It is easy to relate all this with the threat facing the British empire at the end of the eighteenth century: the splendour of Rome provided emotional compensation for the loss of Britain’s colonies. As for Roman history itself, for Gibbon the cause of the fall of the empire was essentially primitive Christianity, which would become, in its institutionalized form, the Catholicism of the Vatican. Gibbon was probably a cyclical philosopher, because in his opinion everything is destined to disappear in an ineluctable historical process ending in an apocalypse. This applies not only to the original purity of religions, but to the institutionalized forms too. He identifies a series of conflicts between the guardians of purity and the spreaders of corruption, who pollute what is pure with 4

He had come back to visit Lord Sheffield, who, after the historian’s death, edited his autobiography, collating six long fragments and publishing them under the title of Autobiography. The work is invaluable, especially for the letters in the appendix, that evidence, among other things, the same hostility as Burke’s to the French Revolution.

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‘enthusiasm’, changing it beyond recognition. Some particularly pedantic critics point out that Gibbon was no factious enemy of Christianity as such, but of its fanatical offspring; his strictures were for the professors of revealed religion rather than the religion itself, which was pure when it arrived on earth but was subsequently sullied and contaminated by the errors of a ‘weak and degenerate race of beings’. One famous passage from the Decline speaks of how astounded the saints Peter and Paul would be were they to find themselves in contemporary Rome. Gibbon recognizes that the sceptical historian must consult Catholic sources and relativize them. He often raises the question of the impartiality that is the distinguishing mark of all historians, including himself. Of course, when he says that this or that source is ‘impartial’, he means ‘at least, as far as I am concerned’, which is not exactly a compelling criterion. In true Enlightenment style, Gibbon overturns the age-old idea of the merits of primitive and medieval Christianity as an announcement of love and charity towards one’s fellow man or as an invaluable factor in the transmission of culture through the work of monastic scribes. In his opinion, the early Christians were an intolerant sect who had no hesitation in torturing and condemning to everlasting hell all those they considered to be ‘pagans’, that is to say, the vast majority of human beings of the time. His revolutionary thesis, that primitive Christianity was not persecuted but persecuting, was based on what was said to be a widespread opinion of his day, not shared by other historical periods. A century later, Pater, in Marius the Epicurean (but not Kingsley in Hypatia) was to question this idea of a message of love and harmony being infected by one of harshness and cruelty. The Christians of the age of the Antonines were witnesses to the persecution of the pagans described by a delirious Tertullian. Other religions preserved more of their original purity, and, apparently unaware of the implications, Gibbon praises Islam, uncontaminated by idolatry or ‘enthusiasm’. 3. In his description of the martyrdom of Hypatia, one of the ‘purple passages’ in Gibbon, carefully placed adjectives and adverbs provide a perspective and a consummate rhetorical strategy of ‘ethos’; in a climax marked by verbs, the woman is ‘inhumanly butchered’ by ‘a troop of savage and merciless fanatics’. The gruesome details of her being skinned alive are presented as a compositio loci in Ignatian meditations. Cameos like this

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are representative of Gibbon’s argumentative technique. His control over his material is superb, his attacks disguised by nuance and innuendo. He often uses ‘perhaps’ for events or personages he admires, and when he has to disapprove, he does so between the lines, or by means of periphrasis. In the first case, he disapproves meekly and then adds a word of praise. When he disapproves, he often uses understatement, so that when he says ‘rarely’ he means ‘never’. He also uses falsely possibilistic argumentations. Another technique is the accumulation of adjectives: one adjective might be missed, three of the same kind amount to an interpretation. So, the portrait of St Simeon the Stylite might at first appear objective and neutral, but is decoded on the basis of nuanced adjectives. Gibbon is, without doubt, a weaver of tales, and his use of language is never purely instrumental. History consists of ideas, and of the people who embody them and put them into action. Decline and Fall is a treasure trove of anecdotes, sketches and portraits that delve deep into the character, psychology and idiosyncrasies of the persons represented. Behind it all can just be seen the author himself, following the action, at times with understanding and admiration, at other with impartiality that coagulates into disapprobation. § 140. Mid-eighteenth-century drama The following presentation of drama from 1700 up to but not including Sheridan will be brief and essential. This is in line with the generally accepted verdict that the 150 years between the last of Farquhar’s plays and the middle of the nineteenth century produced no dramatic writer of distinction and consequently no theatrical masterpiece, even if, in the period in question, there was no significant drop in the number of scripts presented or of authors writing for the stage. Some plays were so popular that they remained in the repertory for decades on end.1 This popularity was largely due to the actors, the most famous of whom was Garrick.2 It 1 2

With no intention of demeaning the recent activity of documentation and discovery, especially regarding female playwrights besides Centlivre. Born, like Dr Johnson, in Lichfield (§ 132.2), David Garrick (1717–1779) was an author in his own right, and in the 1740s and later wrote a number of successful farces, afterpieces, pantomimes and burlesques with more than a little satire on

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must be borne in mind that, while after 1737 London was left with just two licensed theatres,3 Bath, Bristol, York and Ipswich had seen the opening of theatres and the birth of considerable dramatic activity. The decline of the dramatic genre is to be attributed to the predominance of the actor over the playwright, whose only function was by now to provide a platform for the divo of the moment. Audience numbers had fallen somewhat owing to a residue of Puritan propaganda, and the absence of the intelligentsia, who preferred the intimacy of private conversations and left the theatres to ‘society’. I shall deal below, rather briefly, with the ‘pure’ dramatists of the period. I make no pretence to completeness, and omit many that are included in ‘history of drama’ textbooks with summaries of the plots of their plays. The fact is that by now the predominant figure on the literary scene was the ‘all-rounder’. Any writer who wished to be read by as many people as possible, and to be handsomely remunerated, had no option but to turn to journalism. It was the middle class that bought newspapers and novels, and tickets for the theatre, too. Journalists were often playwrights, and vice versa. Playwrights often began as or became novelists, especially after 1737. We have already looked at the most significant dramatic works of the first half of the century in the sections dedicated to Gay, Goldsmith and Fielding in particular. Let us now examine the development of theatrical praxis: longer plays, of several acts, were punctuated by interludes provided by various kinds of performers – jugglers and dancers, for example. Even tragedies would be rounded off by an ‘afterpiece’ that often outshone the main play and attracted more people because of the reduced cost of the ticket. The shows of the Italian commedia dell’arte troupes gave rise to the English pantomime, with traditional Italian characters adapted to local contexts. Hence the Harlequin shows that are still immensely popular

3

foreigners, and, especially, the French. As manager of the Drury Lane Theatre, he staged ‘corrected’ versions of Wycherley and Shakespeare, seeing to it that poetic justice prevails in the end (for example, he has Hamlet kill Claudius in a duel). On the stage, his acting was less wooden, and more natural, than was fashionable up until then; his innovations as a director included the forward-looking figures of the set designer and those responsible for sound and lighting. The Licensing Act was repealed only in 1843.

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in England. The farce genre lost its element of wit and verbal jousting, and became increasingly sentimental. One star of this kind of performance was Samuel Foote (1720–1777), a hugely successful character actor. 2. The ‘heroic play’, made great by Dryden and laid low by his successors, was followed by the ‘domestic play’. The first important exponent of this genre was Nicholas Rowe (1674–1718), the famous and praiseworthy editor of Shakespeare, and author, in his own right, of seven plays, the second of which was Tamerlane (1701), a flagrant historical transposition (and very un-Marlovian) of a contemporary situation, with Tamerlane as William of Orange and Bajazet as Louis XIV. It was performed regularly the whole of the following century for the anniversary of the 1688 Revolution and William’s birthday. Much more down-to-earth was the theme inaugurated by The Fair Penitent (1703), called ‘fair Calista from Genoa’ in the tragedy, which ends with the death of the remorseful heroine, guilty of yielding to the rake, Lothario. The play was hugely popular, and almost certainly provided the seed for Richardson’s Clarissa.4 Rowe chose Greek and medieval subjects for his next plays, and returned to history with Jane Shore (1714), an avowed imitation of Shakespeare, and Lady Jane Grey (1715), in which he displayed a dignified, though not profound, understanding of the female psyche. The two principal plays of George Lillo (1693–1739) – the surname looks Italian, but is not, as he came from a family of Flemish Calvinist émigrés, and he himself was born in London – deserve a longer treatment. Lillo collected editions of ‘domestic’ Elizabethan plays, such as Arden of Feversham, or Thomas Heywood’s masterpiece, and, after a number of failed attempts in various other genres, drew inspiration from them to write The London Merchant; or The History of George Barnwell (1731): the hero is an apprentice seduced by a prostitute and persuaded by her to rob his master and kill his uncle.5 Once discovered, he repents, but the woman launches a fierce attack against the way society works, and 4

5

§ 119.2 n. 34. Also Caelia (1732) by Charles Johnson (1679–1748) confirms the extent of the social phenomena reflected in Richardson’s novels: after being seduced, a woman, like Clarissa, in kept locked up in a brothel, and, in a deliberately tear-jerking finale, dies. The work of a playwright deeply versed in the dramatic canon, Barnwell seems to echo the setting (Elizabethan) and the cast of Marston’s finest city play, Eastward

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dares the judges to cast the first stone; clearly a sensationalistic plot, ready to be turned into a film or an airport novel. In reality the play degenerates into a series of moralistic injunctions to beware of the temptations of the devil. It is written in prose, but the language is heavy and stilted. Fatal Curiosity (1736, in blank verse) is another well-constructed play, and a forerunner of the modern crime drama. In it, an old, poverty-stricken couple, in order to steal a casket, inadvertently kill their son who has just returned from the Indies (he has hidden his identity from his parents to give them a surprise). When they realize what they have done, the father first kills his wife and then himself. Edward Moore (1712–1757), the son of a Nonconformist minister, and founder/editor of The World, brought on stage one of the most widespread and deeply ingrained of contemporary vices: gambling. The protagonist of The Gamester (1753) ends up in the gutter, and commits suicide, nobly repenting for his action at the very last moment. This proto-realist story, too, was aimed quite openly at moving and, above all, schooling the audience. It was regularly performed in the theatres right up to the end of the nineteenth century. 3. Both James Shirley, and fifty years before Moore (1705) Susanna Centlivre (ca 1669–1723), wrote plays called The Gamester, dealing with an addiction that could easily be represented on stage and was sure to attract large audiences, so much so that the plot was re-used in a comic version, in which the male and female roles of gambler and instigator were inverted. The humorously allusive names of the characters owe much to Congreve, as does the witty dialogue, but not the lectures on gambling. Other plays by Centlivre secured Garrick as the lead and had long runs. Among these A Bold Stroke for a Wife (1718) stands out, and features the fourfold disguise of a suitor in order to obtain the permission to marry his sweetheart, Anne Lovely, from her four guardians. One of them, Simon Pure, was to become a proverbial representation of an authentic, genuine person. The title of The Clandestine Marriage (1766), by George Colman (1732–1794), the father of a Romantic dramatist to be examined later, says practically everything about this play that deals with a marriage that will be celebrated after a long

Ho, especially on account of the jeweller, Thorowgood, and the two apprentices, one good, the other bad, though repentant in the end and redeemed.

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series of intrigues, interludes, stock japes and jests, with a blind eye being turned on the fact that the bride is pregnant by the husband-to-be. Arthur Murphy (1727–1805) celebrated, instead, the alliance of women against their husbands, too demanding and cheating, and finally forced to make public amends. The promptness in picking up and using ‘news stories’ is seen in The West Indian (1771), another great success by Richard Cumberland (1732–1811), the author of a total of more than fifty plays, some of them of burning relevance at the time, plus a number of novels, essays and poems. In this play, an ingenuous, generous young man, a bit like Tom Jones, ends up in the grasp of a kind of Lady Bellaston, with a Sophia who forgives him in the end, convinced of his fundamental goodness of heart. Douglas (performed in Edinburgh in 1756), by John Home (1722–1808), a Presbyterian minister and distant relation of the philosopher, Hume, touches a different sentimental cord in a historical play full of lyrical outpourings embedded in a series of descriptive soliloquies. The play ends with the mother’s reunion with her lost son, but the real novelty of the work is the grim, dark medieval atmosphere in keeping with the contemporary Ossianic craze. The Irish versatile journalist Hugh Kelly (1739–1777) is famous for defending Garrick when he was attacked by the poet, Churchill.6 He subsequently gave one of his plays to Garrick to read; the actor-manager immediately realized that there was money to be made, and staged it. It is a quintessential example of sentimental theatre celebrating the qualities of rectitude, reserve and prudence. It was, however, entitled False Delicacy (1768), a sign that the term ‘sentimental’ was by now being debated and problematized, along with the validity itself of the sentimental comedy. Kelly criticizes, more specifically, exaggerated delicacy, because it causes misunderstanding and mischief in the three cases in which it constitutes an obstacle to marriages that have every right to be celebrated. The over-fastidious dialogues between his characters have long been a cause of amusement rather than admiration. § 141. Sheridan Whether on principle or through genetic probability, the Irish are expected to lead lives full of movement, enterprises, coups de théâtre and all 6

§ 131.2.

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sorts of manifestations of exhibitionism, ambition and risk-taking, with feats that border on the incredible, and leaps in the dark that smack of recklessness. All of these elements are to be found in abundance in the life of the Dublin-born Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816), the playwright who, single-handedly, saved the honour of eighteenth-century English theatre. Sheridan had the classic Irish characteristic, the gift of the gab: he could talk and he could get others to talk, as well. He was the nephew of a friend of Swift’s, and born into a family of artists: his father taught elocution, and his mother wrote novels and plays (her first name was Frances, which constitutes the first link with Wilde). The family moved to Bath, and Sheridan was sent to school at Harrow for six years. He did not go to university, but by the time he was twenty he had already published a translation of Aristenetus’ erotic letters (often cited by Burton in his Anatomy), and coauthored with a friend a play that is, in a way, an anticipation of The Critic. The exploit for which he is best known is his elopement, from Bath, with the singer, Elizabeth Linley, a musician’s daughter, whose legendary beauty was immortalized in a portrait by Gainsborough. Officially, Sheridan wished to free her from a suitor – in fact, more than one; he married her in Calais when she was still a minor and took her temporarily to a French convent. The marriage was celebrated again in England, but not before the two suitors had fought a duel. The couple took up residence in a luxurious mansion right in the heart of London, and lived in a style that went far beyond what Sheridan earned from the theatre, for which he had started writing. It has often been regretted that Sheridan should have written plays for only five years, retiring from the stage before he was thirty and with only six plays to his credit. However, he may simply have run out of creativity: after all, he was more of an adaptor and re-arranger, albeit a brilliant one, than creator of original material. At the end of his meteoric theatrical career, Sheridan appeared to consider it of less importance than the political one he was about to embrace in 1780. He quickly rose in this new career, and was elected time and again to Parliament and appointed to prestigious positions at the Treasury and the Foreign Office. He was one of the most outspoken critics of Warren Hastings, accused of corruption during his time as governor of India. Sheridan’s harangue against Hastings went on for six hours and is considered one of the landmarks of political oratory. With all this, he ended his life in poverty. Widowed, sick and debt-ridden, he was visited by his

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creditors as he lay dying; they left him there, and took away with them his furniture, paintings and books, in a kind of ironic rendering of a celebrated scene from his most famous play, as we shall see. 2. Today Sheridan is seen as belonging more properly to the history of politics and parliamentary speaking. Elected as a Whig, he fought for the defence of civil rights, American independence, the extension of suffrage, and Catholic emancipation in Ireland. After the taking of the Bastille, he came out in favour of the French Revolution.1 He played an important role in theatrical management. In 1776 he bought the Drury Lane Theatre from Garrick, and became the manager. In 1792 he had it demolished and rebuilt with more seating room. Most of the plays of the latter part of the century premiered there, helped towards success by the best set designer around and by the acting skills of the Kemble brothers. As a playwright, he caught the fancy of the Romantics: Byron raved about him, saying he excelled in every kind of writing he practised. Later, he was disparaged by critics and literary historians on the grounds that he was not a truly creative writer, but rather a brilliant but superficial entertainer. But whatever academics might say, the fact is that two, if not three, of Sheridan’s plays are still very popular, and are often performed. In the recent past, actors of the calibre of Gielgud, Richardson and Laurence Olivier have shone in the roles of the various protagonists. Sheridan, like Shakespeare and Dickens, created characters that have since become proverbial, and punch-lines so effective as to be remembered and held dear by every well-read Englishman. The two famous plays mentioned above share the theme of the double, or doppelganger. A far from new topos, it looms large in the nineteenth century, and appears to be characteristic of provincial or colonial writers, or of those that might be called ‘misfits’. In order to live in an irrational, incorrigible society (‘a luxurious and dissipated age’ is the expression used in The Critic) one is forced to take on a double identity, and become, in Wilde’s terms, ‘earnest/Ernest’. The immunity afforded by this stratagem is obvious. In Sheridan’s two doppelganger plays, the protagonist creates an 1 See TLS (18 April 1997, 32, and 21 November 1997, 10) for reviews of two biographies that place great emphasis on the political side of Sheridan’s career (as well as a few lesser-known and less admirable aspects of his character).

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alias to avoid being the loser, and also to sort out, as a practical reformer, a tangled situation to which there is no rational solution. 3. The problem Sheridan faced and overcame in his first play, The Rivals (1775), written when he was not yet twenty-five, was how to revitalize an old plot, full of the stale ingredients of comedy, old and more recent. Part of the solution is to invent really fresh, sparkling dialogue, which he does, resulting in some quite new comic effects. ‘Malapropism’ – from the name of one of the characters, Mrs Malaprop – is a linguistic phenomenon that never fails on stage, if handled properly. Some few years ago, here in Italy, a comedian called Nino Frassica became a household name thanks to his strafalcioni, a word that might indeed be rendered by ‘malapropism’. The opening scene featuring Lydia and her maid, Lucy, is remarkable both because of the allusions to current affairs (the talking point of the day was the national debt and the so-called fund for repaying it) and because of the role played by the recently instituted circulating libraries: Lucy hands her seventeen-year-old mistress a bag full of books she has borrowed from the library, a sample of the best-sellers of the day, like the novels of Smollett and Sterne. There are also a few lower quality pot-boilers as well as the odd tale of crime and mystery inserted into otherwise ‘serious’ novels, to be extracted by the reader and read with no reference to the context into which they have been thrust. Immature, eager Lydia lives for and in what she reads, and bends reality to fiction (the father of Captain Absolute, her suitor, says of her: ‘her brain’s turned by reading’).2 This is one of the first public appearances of a character who will turn up, in a gently satirical version, in Northanger Abbey’s Catherine Morland (Charlotte Lennox’s Arabella is not far away either). In the name of similar codes of chivalry, accepted as if they were to apply to everyday life, Lydia rejects the idea of a marriage of convenience. Hence the scene of the tug-of-war between herself and the two comic figures representing the senex, the father of the suitor, and the girl’s aunt, whose idea of marriage is exclusively economic. A solution to the imbroglio is found in the ‘doubling’ of Captain Absolute: he pretends to be Ensign Beverley. One 2

In Beckford’s novel (§ 144), Carathis, Vathek’s diabolical mother, accuses her son of the same fault, when, cast down to hell, he repents, alas too late.

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cannot help thinking of Gretta in Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ – and the memory of the tubercular Furey’s pure, romantic devotion (as against Conroy’s awkward, sterile love): this Ensign pines – must pretend to pine – for Lydia, kneeling in the snow, ‘shivering with cold and while the freezing blast numbed our joints […] how warmly would he press me to pity his flame.’3 Absolute plays the part of the poor but sincerely devoted lover, realizing that Lydia would never even look at a rich captain. Until Lydia is cured of her literary disease, no solution is possible, and conflict must continue. The contest is topical: marriage based on money against a union founded on love and devotion. The second plot of the play might disappoint, weary and strike the reader and the audience as old and stale, but in fact it is meant to act as an ironic counterweight. The sentimental plot, which amuses and stimulates debate, involves Lydia’s friend, Julia, and her relation with the Hamletic figure of Faulkland, who loves her with a neurotic, insecure, weepy kind of love. ‘Laughter’ and ‘tears’ battle it out. The play bristles with literary allusions,4 and Lydia is a kind of Portia facing the three lovers, who arrive to fight a bloodless, hopeless duel shortly before the end. As in Shakespeare, the mystery of Beverley resists to the bitter end; only some of the characters are aware of his disguise. The stormy scene at the beginning between father and son Absolute can only be justified by the fact that the father thinks the son is refusing to marry Lydia, and the son believes he is being forced to marry, not Lydia, but some other woman. 4. The School for Scandal (1777), too, smacks of rifacimento, although it is unanimously considered to be the last great English comedy. Much of the first act is, so to speak, wasted in reconstructing the background information, but then it introduces, without being too obvious, the theme of the double, or, rather, the opposition between surface and depth, or reality and appearance, an old Elizabethan favourite. The two orphan brothers entrusted to Sir Teazle, Joseph and Charles Surface, form a couple that can be traced back to Edmund and Edgar in King Lear, with a contemporary counterpart in Tom Jones: right from the start, the reader is in doubt as to which of the 3 4

Absolute-Beverley coughs and sneezes; this may have given Joyce the idea of TB. Mrs Malaprop mangles a quotation from Hamlet in IV.3. The action takes place in Bath, like many of the plays of the period.

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brothers is good and which evil. It soon emerges that holier-than-thou Joseph is the hypocritical villain, while Charles, despite his apparent profligacy, is essentially a good person. Teazle is the widowed senex who has married a ‘country wife’, like Wycherley’s,5 a little lively, and, even, lustful. The brothers’ uncle arrives back from India, and, in true Elizabethan fashion, does not present himself immediately to his nephews; he wishes to find out first which of the two is worthy to be his heir. He wants to evaluate surface and depth, and even change the valency of the signs. The covertly evil brother hedges his bets by attempting to seduce both his brother’s betrothed, and Teazle’s young wife, until, in the end, he is unmasked. This fifth play lacks the verve and shine of the first one, and languishes for nearly three acts, after which two enigmatic, suggestive scenes breathe fresh life into it. The first is a kind of temptation of Christ in the wilderness, when the uncle incognito decides to put Charles to the test: Charles is in dire need of money to fund his hedonistic life style, and sells him every single painting in the house, except the portrait of the very uncle who stands before him in disguise. Moved by this refusal to sell his likeness, the uncle changes his opinion of Charles, and, in his heart, blesses him. The scene is long, and worthy of Shakespeare’s late romances: the uncle, like Mark Antony, made aware of this reality, this depth, keeps repeating to himself: ‘But he would not sell my picture.’ The second great scene is the equally famous one of the screen: Teazle comes to visit Joseph Surface while the latter is having a tryst with Teazle’s wife, who immediately hides behind the screen. Teazle has come to confide to Joseph his suspicion that Charles is having an affair with his wife. Joseph is forced to extol the values of loyalty and honesty and condemn his brother, while he himself has just been seducing the wife of the man he is now hypocritically consoling. In a further twist, Charles arrives on the scene, and Teazle asks Joseph to unmask him. All this while, Lady Teazle is behind the screen listening to every word. Teazle then suggests that he, Teazle, should hide behind the screen and listen to the confrontation between the two brothers. Naturally the denouement is kept for the end, when Charles and Teazle – agreeing between themselves with a wink that such is ‘the way of the

5

§ 55.

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world’ – remove the screen and see Lady Teazle, whom Joseph had spoken of as a ‘French milliner’. There has been no adultery, the Teazles make up, and Joseph Surface gets a metaphorical whipping. 5. The third of Sheridan’s major dramatic works is The Critic (1779), a postlude in three acts in the manner of The Rehearsal: in other words, it is theatre within the theatre. The first act presents a drama critic who is nagged by his wife because he refuses to take an interest in politics. He receives visits from various playwrights (no doubt easily identified by the audiences of the day), who are criticized for the very faults attributed to Sheridan himself. The refreshing self-irony lightens the discussions within the play on several controversies and practices, like ‘puffing’, which consisted in procuring positive reviews of plays, as illustrated by the tragedian Puff, in a list of the different types of these flattering, but false, reviews. The second and third acts present a rehearsal of the author’s play on the Spanish Armada of 1588, punctuated by comments from critics and members of the audience. The historical plot is mingled with a Romeo and Juliet kind of love story between the daughter of an English general, and the son of a Spanish captain. In 1799, after a long break, Sheridan returned to the theatre with a play called Pizarro, based on Kotzebue’s Die Spanier in Peru. The bloodthirsty conquistador pursues the fugitive, Alonzo, a supporter of the ideal of human rights and liberty, and, after catching him, locks him in a dungeon to await execution. The Peruvian, Rolla, takes his place in a noble act of self-sacrifice that will be re-enacted in Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. So we have yet another case of the ‘double’: Rolla pretends to be a friar, gives his disguise to the prisoner, and Alonzo, dressed in his religious habit, manages to escape. § 142. Walpole* Undisputed source and fountain-head of the Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1765, but actually published in December 1764) by Horace 1

* Works, ed. P. Sabor, 5 vols, London 1998; Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis et al., 48 vols, New Haven, CT 1937–1983. D. M. Stuart, Horace Walpole, London 1927; H. Honour, Horace Walpole, London 1957; W. S. Lewis, Horace Walpole, London 1960; R.  W. Ketton-Cremer,  Horace Walpole: A Biography, London 1966;

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Walpole (1717–1797, from 1791 fourth earl of Orford) offered, instead of the clear, sharp outlines of the Augustans, mystery, suggestiveness, the hardly perceived presence; emotion and the paranormal took the place of cold reason. The Middle Ages became fashionable – not as in wandering scholars or pre-Lenten wassails – but dark, threatening castles, wind-swept ruins, or mist-enshrouded heaths, the home of phantoms and fays. This new kind of writing, practically invented by Walpole at the end of the eighteenth century, was looked down on by highbrow critics, and the Castle of Otranto was snubbed, and dubbed as childish, confused and improbable; but it became a genre, and a popular one at that, and caught on; the ‘Gothic’ led to the ‘neo-Gothic’ of the Victorians and Decadents, and is still with us in the form of postmodern literature and film. In early literary histories, Walpole is seen, more than as a novelist, as an invaluable eye witness of the reigns of George II and George III, as the great rehabilitator of the figure of Richard III, an art critic and collector of anecdotes pertaining to English painting, and, above all, as a letter-writer. Almost half a century of English life – politics, manners, literature and the great men of the time – lives on in his 4,000 letters addressed to 200 correspondents by this last-born son of former Prime Minister Robert Walpole.1 The Castle was timidly compared by some to The Mysterious Mother, said to be ‘the best of the worst tragedies ever written’, a turgid offering in blank verse that left its readers (it was never actually performed) deeply troubled by its audacious subject: a mother commits incest with her son, and subsequently attempts, unsuccessfully, to prevent him from marrying the daughter born from their union, who suffers the implosion of this ‘dead secret’, as Wilkie Collins, one of those subsequent neo-Gothic novelists, would have termed it. The forty-eight volumes of Walpole’s letters have been combed through to corroborate and document this gender secret, and in so doing have acknowledged the significance of this neglected play within the context of his other works. However, for the average Englishman, the name of Walpole conjures up M. Kallich, Horace Walpole, Boston, MA 1971; CRHE, ed. P. Sabor, London 1987; T. Mowl, Horace Walpole: The Great Outsider, London 1996.  1

Contemporary rumour had it that Walpole was born from his mother’s adultery with Lord Hervey.

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not just his famous novel, but also Strawberry Hill, a far from sumptuous residence on the banks of the Thames, not far from Pope’s villa, which Walpole bought and restored in Gothic (actually, rococo) style, turning it into a veritable museum full of the most diverse objets d’art, curiosities and memorabilia, not to mention a printing press and editorial office, which published, among other works, Gray’s poems.2 2. The term ‘Gothic’3 in reality began as a political-conceptual category in the first part of the eighteenth century signifying the proto-Protestant, anti-Catholic character of Germanic civilization, which became a symbolic banner of ‘Whiggery’. Gothic architecture was inaugurated with the construction of the Temple of Liberty in 1747, but the epigraph inscribed on it carried the admonishment that the Roman republic had turned into a decadent tyranny. At the same time, medieval architecture native to England was rediscovered – confused and chaotic, to be sure, but natural, and quite unlike the cold regularity of neoclassical buildings. When, in the 1830s, the Houses of Parliament were destroyed by fire, and the station of St Pancras was constructed, the architectural style chosen could be nothing but Gothic. In his Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762), an appendix to a series of imaginary dialogues between a number of contemporary celebrities, Bishop Richard Hurd (1720–1808) expounded the thesis that the Greek concept of the heroic had migrated to Italian chivalric poems and from there to Spenser and Shakespeare, classified as ‘Gothic’ literature; he also made the prophetic statement that Romanticism was a timeless necessity which nevertheless changed with the passing of time. A famous aphorism evidences the revaluation of the national treasure of Gothic-Romantic, and prepares the way for eighteenth-century Gothic: ‘What we have gotten from this revolution […] is a great deal of good sense. What we have lost is a world of fine fabling’.

2 3

On his friendship with Gray, cf. § 129. I summarize here the first chapter of the classic study by D. Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day, London 1980, reprinted in 2 vols, 1996. I shall return to the question of the subsequent evolution of Gothic in § 145.1.

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3. In 1774, Walpole made a complete, detailed catalogue of his collection at Strawberry Hill, which today constitutes valuable testimony of a fashion and taste that began at the end of his century and lasted up until the middle of the next. The various rooms of his villa – drawing rooms and parlours registered with maniacal precision – contain works by famous painters, ‘japanned’ writing-desks, Sèvres china, Roman terracotta jugs, Turkish carpets, etchings, coats-of arms, and endless quantities of bric-à-brac. There is even a floor tile from William the Conqueror’s kitchen, the plug of a bed warmer that had belonged to Charles II, and a toothpick-holder made of Egyptian rock-crystal. Strawberry Hill is a carefully constructed triumph of kitsch (‘you have lived too long amidst true taste [in Italy] to understand venerable barbarism’, wrote Walpole to a friend who was bewildered by this indiscriminate eclecticism). Victorian drawing rooms were to be just as crowded with furniture and curios as Walpole’s; Wilde, Beardsley and Beerbohm followed in his footsteps, mixing old and new, authentic and false, and declaring the ultimate uselessness of the objet d’art. The Strawberry Hill catalogue ties in with The Castle of Otranto quite cleverly and substantially. One of the drawing rooms contains a ‘View of the Castle of Otranto’, in another is a portrait of the lady to whom the novel was dedicated; there is also a watercolour of a ‘procession’ to the said castle, and another painting of a young woman busy reading Walpole’s novel. In fact, it was at Strawberry Hill that Walpole conceived and wrote the book. While the catalogue is conspicuous for its scrupulous and exhaustive documentation of the contents of the rooms, the novel is characterized by a lack of time shifts in the completely continuous flow of the narration. The bare, dry list of objects in the catalogue is lit up from time to time by short anecdotes (on, for example, the dynastic background of the subjects of the paintings, or the problems faced by executors or owners); or a particular canvas might occasion an account of grim acts of plot and bloodshed connected with the subject, like the micro-novel (Gothic, what else?) about Vasari’s – probably inauthentic – portrait of Bianca Cappello, and the series of murders and cruelty that followed her fatal decision to become the lover of Francesco de’ Medici. 4. A vague, though recognizably rationalistic distrust of the supernatural and the marvellous surfaces in the two prefaces of The Castle of Otranto. At the height of a wave of literary fakes, from Chatterton to

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Macpherson, Walpole tells the reader that the following story, the events of which refer to a period between 1095 and 1243, was found in a document printed in Naples in 1529 and discovered in the library of an old Catholic family in England. As to the motives behind the original story, one theory is that some priest may have wanted to lend authority to popular superstition. When he affirms that for the moment the story is only ‘matter of entertainment’, he is in fact distancing himself from what he writes: even romances no longer make use of the supernatural; yet the historian must report the reality of his time. In the second preface Walpole openly acknowledges his authorship of the story (the ploy described above has been used for reasons of prudence), and makes a declaration of poetics: his intention is to merge two kinds of prose narrative, the excessively fantastic one of the past, usually referred to as romance, with the more realistic contemporary kind, which we call the novel; in other words, he aims to present characters that, even when they are under the influence of a spell or some other kind of supernatural force, speak and act naturally. Walpole invokes Shakespeare to defend, against Voltaire, the mixing of the serious and the clownish, and, with this, the creation of a ‘new kind of romance’. The pace of the narration is brisk, like a play by Shakespeare or Aeschylus, and indeed the novel shares with drama not just the structure (emphasized by strict unity of time: everything happens in the space of three days, and there are five chapters, mirroring the five acts of the traditional play), but also by the ‘message’: the usurpers lose their ill-gotten thrones and power is returned to the hands of the legitimate owners.4 Alfonso, former lord of Otranto, has been poisoned and his will fraudulently altered. The usurper Manfred, who in the past has dedicated many churches and convents to him, receives from St Nicholas a suspension of due punishment on his descendants. In the end, however, the axe falls, preceded by a series of wonders. The acknowledgement of the legitimate heir, whose 4

Recent interpretation of the novel as a political allegory underlines the problem – left unresolved – of bestowing legitimacy on a power no longer based on the divine right of kings, and which might appear to be, right from the Plantagenets (and above all because of Henry VIII’s divorces, the Glorious Revolution, and the Hanover succession), nothing but a chain of usurpations.

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identity the reader has suspected right from the beginning, and which Manfred tries desperately to thwart, even resorting to blackmail, comes only after numerous twists and coups de théâtre. Jerome, a friar from the nearby convent, explains and vouches for Theodore’s rightful claim to Alfonso’s title and property, in that Alfonso, on his way back from the Holy Land, has secretly married a Sicilian woman, who died while giving birth to a daughter. The daughter, in turn, became the wife of the friar (before he took his vows). From their union was born Theodore, who comes on the scene dressed as a peasant. Theodore’s heroic recklessness sets in motion the principal events of the story: he frees Isabella and helps her to escape; both Matilda and Hippolita fall in love with him, and he succeeds in taking one for the other; he nearly kills Isabella’s father who has come looking for her; he is imprisoned in a tower by Manfred, set free by Matilda, and takes refuge in a forest, where he wanders about without any fear of the ‘infernal agents’ that scare other wayfarers. Manfred’s evil designs tragically fail on all fronts; indeed, they turn against him: when he learns of Theodore’s love for Matilda, he stabs Matilda by mistake, and nearly kills himself too. A thunderclap strikes the castle, and demolishes it. From the ruins rises a huge effigy of Alfonso, who proclaims Theodore his rightful heir, then ascends to heaven through the clouds which, parting, reveal the image of St Nicholas welcoming back Alfonso. Both Manfred and Hippolita take religious vows, and only later does Theodore marry Isabella, unable as he is to forget Matilda. 5. So, with the help of elements taken from romance (the prophecy that tortures Manfred, the scar that proves the true identity of Theodore, the close-call decapitation avoided by pure chance, the discovery of a huge buried sword that leads her father to Isabella) Walpole gives his version of the Middle Ages, a period of plots and usurpation, saintly women at the mercy of diabolical husbands, like the wife and daughter of Manfred (both are passive victims of his abuse; one of them has a secret desire to become a nun). This would-be historical novel has to come to terms with visitations from the supernatural: the wedding ceremony between Manfred’s son, Conrad, and Isabella is interrupted tragically by a portent in the form of a gigantic helmet with black plumes – the very helmet that adorns the head of the marble statue of Alfonso the Good in the church

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of St Nicholas – which crushes Conrad. Under this helmet, the young peasant (Theodore) is imprisoned, accused of necromancy when he tells everyone where the helmet comes from. When, later, Manfred pursues Isabella along the corridors of the castle, in order to kidnap and marry her, the portrait of Alfonso the Good sighs deeply, comes out of the painting with a grave and melancholy air, and leads him to the door of a room. The door is slammed shut in front of him. The arrival of horsemen is accompanied by a sinister, threefold shaking of the plumes of the helmet ‘as if bowed by some invisible wearer’; among the riders, carrying a gigantic sword that slips from their hands and remains sticking in the ground in front of the helmet, is Isabella’s father, incognito. Manfred, like a latter-day Macbeth, believes he sees before him the ghost of Alfonso, and witnesses yet another portent when he tries desperately to marry Matilda to Frederic of Vicenza: three drops of blood fall from the nose of Alfonso’s statue, ‘a miraculous indication that the blood of Alfonso will never mix with that of Manfred’. Frederic is dissuaded by another explicit supernatural warning: the ghost of the friar who had enjoined him before to look for the buried sword. However, as I have said, Walpole seeks to reduce and circumscribe the supernatural and diabolical element rather than give it free rein. The portrait of the villain, who in the end repents and enters a convent, is deliberately softened by touches of nobility and even pathos, in an attempt to give a rational explanation to what appears to be supernatural. While the appearance of the helmet might be a prodigy, there is nothing supernatural in Theodore’s rescue of Isabella as she flees Manfred: one of the clasps of the helmet has in fact made a hole in the floor and opened a passage to the vaults of the castle. The supernatural potential of the scene when Alfonso sighs and steps out of the painting is to some degree reduced by what follows, when Hippolita categorically denies the account of the servants, who say they have seen the devil in the great hall, where Manfred was taken by the spectre. The conflict between excess and moderation in the use of fantasy is well-illustrated by the disagreement between Bianca and Matilda as to the identity of Theodore: Bianca thinks the peasant is a prince in disguise and a magician empowered by a talisman, while Matilda criticizes her for ‘resolving everything into magic’.

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§ 143. Radcliffe The background and upbringing of Ann Ward Radcliffe (1764–1823) might be considered far from auspicious in the light of the writer she was to become – the toast of her age, the Gothic novelist, whose books sold like hot cakes and met with the approval of critics and colleagues right up to the end of the nineteenth century. However, daughter of a ‘mere’ shopkeeper as she was, she was fortunate in having a maternal uncle who was a partner in the famous china company of Josiah Wedgwood; his house in Chelsea was frequented by intellectuals and bluestockings, among them Elizabeth Montagu. It was in this environment that Radcliffe’s literary ambitions were kindled and fanned. In 1787 she married William Radcliffe, the editor of progressive newspapers who championed the French Revolution, the abolition of slavery and parliamentary reform. Two years after her marriage, she made her debut as a novelist. Her career was relatively brief, a mere eight years, during which she published, in rapid succession, five novels and a travel diary ‘of the summer of 1794’. A sixth novel appeared posthumously in 1826 after twenty years of inexplicable silence. Radcliffe’s version of the Gothic novel (Walpole was followed by other imitators whom I shall deal with below) entails, along with ‘terror’, a considerable amount of  ‘feeling’ – not just the typical eighteenth-century pathos but a quite new sensibility towards nature, a phenomenon already present in the poetry, pre-Romantic and Romantic, of the period. Ekphrasis appears in Radcliffe’s novels in an endless series of word-paintings, many quite detached from the story itself, and deriving, no doubt, from the author’s travel diaries written during her trips to the Rhineland, Holland, the north of England and the Lake District. For this reason, Radcliffe is often seen as the Salvator Rosa of the novel. Above all, however, her works openly declare that the roots of Gothic fiction are to be found in Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, in the plays of Kyd, Middleton, Webster in particular, Ford and Otway, with their vision of an Italy almost hyperbolically dark and sinister, and gratuitously violent (this was largely a literary construct: like the playwrights in question, Ann Radcliffe never actually visited Italy), and the stereotype of the Machiavellian molester of defenceless damsels. It was the Elizabethans who first formulated what was to become an obsessive antithesis between attraction and repulsion for the symbols of Catholicism. By Radcliffe’s

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day, the supernatural interventions that abound in, for example, Kyd and Webster, and are taken at face value, now necessitated a rational explanation: once the light of reason is switched on, the bogeys disappear. It was from Radcliffe that Byron took the figure of the dark, moody hero, later to be known as ‘Byronic’; and Scott declared himself her follower, calling her ‘the first poetess of romantic fiction’. But times change, and gradually her novels slipped out of fashion and were criticized because they used pre-existing, melodramatic models, far-fetched and all very much the same, apart from the odd, insignificant detail, with unconvincing, two-dimensional cardboard cut-outs for characters. Taken as a whole, Radcliffe’s novels might be seen as one macrotext in which Barthes’s cardinal functions are present in the form of variations and modulations, separated by a number of incidental, ancillary episodes. In this sense they may be compared with Richardson’s macrotext, which divides, as we have seen, into three parts, closely linked by internal parallelisms that are at times chiastic, and are based on the themes of seduction and imprisonment and on the conjunction of terror and pathos (though with the exclusion of the supernatural). The Gothic novel, with Radcliffe as its figurehead, was subsequently taken over by feminist criticism, which claimed to see throughout the genre no mere exercise in oneiric escapism, but a disguised, though fierce, attack on the patriarchal structure of society. 2. With the exception of the first and sixth novel, Radcliffe’s oeuvre can be said to consist of four main texts, all written in the last ten years of the eighteenth century. These are: A Sicilian Romance1 (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797). A Sicilian Romance already contains many of the features of Radcliffe’s Gothic, and may thus be analysed more in detail than the two intermediate novels. It opens using the well-worn ploy of the fictional narrator, in the person of a tourist visiting the ruins of the castle that once was home to the Mazzinis, a powerful Sicilian family. The narrator/tourist imagines how magnificent the castle must have been in the sixteenth century. The story itself is

1

‘Romance’ here bears the connotations of adventure and imagination.

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initiated by the discovery of a manuscript, and gathers strength during a conversation with the inevitable abbot of the neighbouring convent. All of Radcliffe’s plots hinge on two young lovers, both the epitome of purity and innocence, who, in their pursuit of happiness, encounter well-wishers and, more often, enemies. Hence another recurring feature of the genre: the lovers’ flight from baying pursuers, often across deserted moonlit heath, up hill and down dale, dogged by danger. Julia, the daughter of Marquis Mazzini, succeeds in marrying her beloved Hippolitus de Vereza only after a whole host of unspeakably dreadful experiences. The sanctum of mystery is the uninhabited wing of the castle, in which, as we discover later, Julia’s mother has long been kept prisoner after being repudiated and buried alive there by the Marquis, who wished to be free to marry again. The two plot lines converge when the two lovers end up by mistake in the forbidden wing, and come upon the prisoner. Mother and daughter collapse in tears in each other’s arms. At the beginning the reader is tempted to give credence to the supernatural, only to be reassured later that there is a rational explanation for everything that happens in the story. The forbidden wing of the castle is rumoured to be haunted, and this is sufficient to keep all enquirers away. As always in Radcliffe, light is a tantalizing phenomenon that appears of its own accord but disappears when sought. The Marquis is the only character for whom ghosts do not exist; he volunteers to explore the dungeons to set his servants’ minds at rest. Obviously, he is able to do this as he himself is the creator of the mystery. Whoever else ventures into that daunting place is aware of a spatial deformation typical of the Gothic novel: space seems to well out, labyrinthine and endless. At the same time, Radcliffe is vocal against all forms of superstition, here given a particularly Italian colouring. The Marquis is prey to the blinding passion thought to be characteristic of southern Europeans, and immures his first wife to satisfy an insane infatuation; his second ‘wife’ falls in love with Hippolitus, Julia’s betrothed, and faced with the impossibility of her passion, becomes involved in a quite transparent ‘castle conspiracy’. The Marquis is partially rehabilitated, but the machine of divine punishment has by now been set in motion in the form of a series of poisonings that spare none except the two young lovers. The Catholic Church is, here, represented by the abbey of St Augustin, where Julia takes refuge and from which the

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light of wisdom and science is all but excluded. One particularly incisive scene portrays a group of monks in full wassail when they are supposed to be praying. We are shown a young woman, and her betrothed, forced to enter the convent and embrace, not each other, but the religious life. Paradoxically, the plot is the fruit of an archaic ecclesiastical legislation: everything, almost, would have turned out differently if only it has been possible to get divorced, and the Marquis’s poor first wife would not have spent fifteen years languishing in the dark dungeon of a forbidding castle. 3. The key role of the persecutor in the wildly far-fetched plot of The Romance of the Forest, set entirely in France, is given to a Marquis who, in his villainies, is curiously reminiscent of his real-life peer, de Sade. Radcliffe’s Marquis attempts to seduce and then to eliminate the orphaned and persecuted Adeline, who is given refuge by a Parisian family hiding from creditors in a tumble-down old abbey in the middle of a forest. These, and other surreal or sensational elements, like the skeleton discovered in a secret room of the abbey, or the mysterious manuscript written by a dying man, will be explained only in the epilogue, when, in a great coup de théâtre, the Marquis, who has bloodied his hands with the murder of Adeline’s father, poisons himself, not before leaving his entire fortune to her, whom he acknowledges as his niece, the daughter of his half-brother. Just as unconvincing is the part of the plot that deals with the mutual suspicions of the La Mottes, and with their son, Louis, and Theodore, the husband-to-be. The Mysteries of Udolpho is set in 1584, but the many obvious anachronisms compromise all attempts at verisimilitude of time and place. The scene is, first, Gascony, then the Pyrenees, and, later, Venice, but the much-admired descriptions of romantic landscapes were the fruit of, not personal observation, but travel books. The novel’s centre is Udolpho Castle in the Apennines, a place at once physical, psychic and symbolic, where the familiar Radcliffe theme of imprisonment is explored, and with it the claustrophobia of labyrinthine space. The villainous Montoni (nomen omen, it might be said) not only covets Emily’s inheritance, but contrives to seduce and torment first Emily’s paternal aunt, then Emily herself, a fragile girl who is easily scared.2 Right up 2

See in particular the topos, used later by Browning and George Eliot, of the lifting of the veil, in this case from the portrait in a forbidden room of the castle (chapter

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to Emily’s successful flight to France from the clutches of Montoni, the novel is terse, clear and relentless in its forward movement; but then it falls off, and becomes a tangled sequence of unbelievable, melodramatic, sensational episodes, tacked on to the main plot,3 and resulting in the deferment of the reunion of the two innocent lovers. 4. In The Italian, the Neapolitan nobleman, Vivaldi (the novel is Gothic, not historical, so the Vivaldi here has nothing to do with the ‘red priest’ from Venice who composed the Four Seasons) is in love with the chaste Ellena, who thinks she is of humble birth, but will turn out to be the daughter of a count. Her adversary is Vivaldi’s mother, the Marchesa, aided by the sinister friar, Schedoni, later revealed to be the uncle of the very girl he is meant to eliminate, as well as being the murderer of her father (his own brother). Of course, what I have just given is a drastically compressed version of a novel that is all plot, plot that is almost diabolically complex, full to overflowing with twists and turns, surprises, sudden revelations, and a thousand other signs that here we have an author who absolutely revels in the machinery and paraphernalia of suspense. This is Italy at its most stereotyped: friars with an unmentionable past; haughty abbesses and whispering monks; ruined fortresses clinging to unapproachable cliffs, the beckoning waters of the bay of Naples, and, in the background, Mount Vesuvius grumbling and smoking against a deep blue sky;4 a proud, enervated aristocracy, addicted

3

4

XIX of the edition in two volumes), and of Emily’s subsequent fainting. What exactly Emily has seen (‘what it hid was no painting’ but a hallucination of a body being eaten by worms) is revealed only at the end of the novel. It is highly likely that the name of Vaudracour in Wordsworth’s Prelude is an echo of Emily’s chaste lover, Valancourt. Emily’s maternal aunt died by poisoning by order of Lady Laurentini, who, overcome with remorse, entered a convent, and reveals this secret before dying. This lady was the wife of the rightful owner of the Apennine castle, and Montoni has been brought to justice. Valancourt is rehabilitated, because he took to gambling just to help a needy friend. Among the ‘anthology pieces’ see the description of the Apennine precipices that mirror Ellena’s feelings as she is hauled off, on the Marchesa’s orders, to a hermitage in Abruzzo; Ellena’s arrival in Rome with Schedoni, the magnificent spectacle of the carnival and the opera, the Corso completely lit up to mark the event, then the

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to the pleasures of the flesh and of music. The invariably black habits of the friars merge into the unrelenting darkness of the churches, impenetrable to all forms of light whatsoever. A recurring feature of this dark Italian scene is the deceptive trembling of sound and light: on almost every page, mysterious gleams come and go, and the ear picks up sounds of moaning, or suffering, sometimes mad ravings, as well as music that issues sinister from some unhidden source. The chiaroscuro technique extends to the characters, too: none of them are without a greater or lesser degree of ambiguity. Very little of what happens in the course of the novel can however be attributed to the supernatural. Vivaldi, often on the point of surrendering to what he believes to be the evidence of his eyes, undergoes a gradual process of disintoxication. At the beginning, faced by a mysterious friar who hinders him in his pursuit of the woman he desires, he is deceived into thinking, but only for a moment, that his path is barred by some superhuman agent, or some magical force; in reality, throughout the novel, and especially in the episode referring to his imprisonment, he keeps his feet firmly on the ground, however shifting reality might seem, however mysterious and demonic the phenomena he faces, and however difficult to interpret. Just as the descriptions of landscape are reminiscent of the paintings of Salvator Rosa, so Italy and the Italians are a purely literary construct, hence the allusive onomastics, with sinister suggestions of crime and violence. Hence, too, the linguistic howlers and geographical blunders: ‘Vincenzo’ becomes ‘Vincentio’, ‘Paolo’ is ‘Paulo’, ‘Elena’ is written ‘Ellena’, and ‘Posillipo’ is transformed into the improbable ‘Pausilippo’.5 There is nothing new in the representation of a yawning gap between the city with its affluent aristocracy and the backward, underpopulated countryside around it (social criticism creeps in when the Marchesa Vivaldi fails to secure a rich wife for her son, while she spends more on

5

dark streets of the outskirts. A parallel between the kidnapping of Ellena and that of Lucia at the hands of the Innominato is examined by Praz in his ‘Ratto in carrozza’ (SSI, vol. II, 95–9). Praz is convinced that Manzoni had read The Italian. For the diffusion of the Gothic novel in Italy see also PRA, 111–12 and n. 60. In this case, Radcliffe relied for the settings on the memoirs of Mrs Piozzi, Dr Johnson’s friend, and on other travel books. Epigraphs from Shakespeare and Milton abound, together with others drawn from the most fashionable poets of the eighteenth century.

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entertaining than the Marchese actually earns). Just as conventional is the contrast between the neoclassical order of the city and the wild, rocky nature of the surrounding countryside. In short, it is clear that Radcliffe is not concerned with verisimilitude, be it historical or psychological (the novel is set in 1758, yet the last part takes place in the dungeons of an anachronistic tribunal of the Inquisition). 5. We now come to the thematic centre and main subject of the novel: a highly critical rendering of Italy, and a denunciation of Catholicism. Radcliffe’s Italy is the epitome of oppressive religion, with its plethora of churches, convents and monasteries, and friars and nuns in whom virtue and morality are the exception rather than the rule, slaves as they are to a murky past and a rankling conscience. There is, however, in this novel, one instance of verisimilitude, consisting of a ‘frame’ that acts as a kind of buffer, or filter, or antechamber – a structural ploy much used in the fiction of the time, and later, especially when the subject matter is exotic, or at least unfamiliar. So, the novel begins with a group of English tourists on a visit to Naples; true to type, they are surprised, not to say astounded (as they are nowadays, too), by the apparent lawlessness reigning in this country where ‘murders are so numerous’ that the cities would be empty, were it not for the fact that murderers are given sanctuary in the many convents and monasteries (see the case of Fra Cristoforo in The Betrothed). The ensuing story emerges from the perusal of a long-lost manuscript (another device to be used by Manzoni). Clearly the author aims to compare and contrast two different worlds, and the contrast becomes more sharply defined in the episode – quite frankly, rather too long – of Vivaldi’s imprisonment in the dungeons of the Inquisition. Here, Vivaldi is no longer the brash, fearless Neapolitan, but, almost, an Englishman in the calm, rational way of reacting to his straitened circumstances. He displays admirable self-control and articulation as he responds to the absurd charges levelled against him by the tribunal. In spite of dire threats of cruel torture, he resists, and succeeds in the end in proving his innocence. 6. Of course, the Italian par excellence is Schedoni, and it is in Schedoni that Radcliffe furnished the most compelling proof of the literary nature of her inspiration. We find echoes of numerous Shakespearean villains in this sinister friar; with the Marchesa – herself a kind of Lady Macbeth to her

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mild-mannered consort – he is an Iago resorting to all the tricks of casuistry and deceit of which he is capable. Ruthless and clear-sighted, Schedoni changes at the end of the novel, and becomes human: he imprisons Ellena in a ruined castle with a view to killing her, but then, inexplicably, falters, as does the paid assassin charged with carrying out the murder. Just as he is about to stab Ellena in the heart, he sees she is wearing a portrait on a chain round her neck: he believes it is his own image, while it is, instead, that of his brother, Ellena’s father. He has a change of heart: everything he has done so far must be undone, and, far from hindering the match, he now becomes an enthusiastic advocate. Subsequently, Schedoni falls victim to the plots and mysteries he himself has created, and must pay the price: repentance comes too late. Schedoni was a favourite with the Romantics because of his mixture of pride, melancholy, dignity and mystery. He is, before Byron, the best example of the Romantic hero, and may be considered a forerunner or herald of the more famous Rochester and Heathcliff created by the Brontë sisters. It may be added, in conclusion, that one or two minor characters are particularly effective, such as the servant, Paulo, who might have been taken directly from the commedia dell’arte, and the assassin, Spalatro. § 144. Beckford Well and truly a cult figure, one of the many English eccentrics1 with the power to entrap and entrance those prepared to fall under his spell, while leaving many others completely cold: such is William Beckford (1759–1844), whose Vathek (1786) both derives and diverges from the paradigm of the Gothic novel. Beckford has received what might seem to be an excessive amount of attention from biographers given the scarcity of his production, but it cannot be denied that his life makes good reading, full of outrageous exhibitions of whimsicality and eccentricity, a bit like that of Sheridan, only more flamboyant. So, who was Beckford? First of all, he was wealthy: his father, twice mayor of London, had made a fortune in the sugar plantations of the West Indies and left much of it to his son. As 1

After him, and in his wake, are Byron, Beardsley and Firbank. Coleridge is indebted to Beckford in two out of three of his major poems.

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a child he was spoilt and pampered; he was given piano lessons by Mozart,2 and tutored in painting and architecture by famous artists of the day. At the age of about twenty he travelled in Italy, Spain and Portugal,3 and immortalized his experiences in his memoirs, which present the figure of a rather dreamy intellectual, often lost in his thoughts, but quick to note anything odd or curious that meets his eye. The only other work of his that is still read is a kind of parody of Johnson’s Lives, a series of ‘imaginary biographies of inexistent painters’.4 On his return from his travels, in 1796, Beckford commissioned the building of a luxurious abbey at Fonthill, near Salisbury, a truly ‘Gothic pile’, complete with embattlements, full of oriental frippery, not unlike Walpole’s Strawberry Hill. Of uncertain gender, to say the least, he became infatuated with his ‘beloved Kitty’ (the fifteen-year-old William Courtenay), and came very near to meeting the same end as Oscar Wilde, like him an admirer of the pomp of Catholic ritual, and a devotee of St Anthony. Towards the end of his life he was still to be seen walking down the street in Bath dressed in wildly unfashionable attire and acting in such a way that passers-by would laugh or snigger. So, even when alive, he was the subject of rumours and the source of scandal. Byron alone distanced himself from the universal head-shaking occasioned by Beckford’s antics. 2. Written originally in French, like Wilde’s Salome – and in only three days and nights, without so much as a change of clothes, as Beckford never tired of underlining – Vathek was translated into English by the Reverend Samuel Henley, under the supervision of the author. The symbiosis is perfect, and memorable. The two versions are aesthetically balanced – like those of the stories and novels of Beckett, another Irishman – and are studied by scholars of both English and French as independent

2

3 4

In his splendid article, ‘Il califfo Beckford’ (SSI, vol. I, 195–200), Praz speaks of the author’s life as ‘a symphony by Mozart’, and scans it in terms of a musical score in four movements. This very indulgent piece of writing by Praz is somewhat modified in a later piece, ‘Un precedente del caso Wilde: Beckford’ (SSI, vol. II, 158–9), based on more recent biographical studies. Praz never tired of repeating that Beckford’s description of Venice appears verbatim in The Mysteries of Udolpho. PSL, 394.

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linguistic systems.5 The novel contains a great deal of autobiographical material: Vathek is Beckford himself, the mother is the author’s parent who wished to keep control of him, and from whom Beckford wanted to break free; the beloved Nouronihar, not really essential to the plot, is Louisa, the cousin Beckford was in love with. ‘Kitty’ is the very young Gulchenrouz, who surprisingly steals the last few lines of the story, in which he is seen immobile, ‘in undisturbed tranquillity, and in the pure happiness of childhood’. In my view, Vathek fits neatly into no category or genre; it is yet another of those one-off eccentricities of which English literature is full. In any case, it cannot be called ‘Gothic’: it is, rather, an oriental tale, and lacks the Gothic requisites of persecutor and persecuted, the forbidding castle and the dark dungeon (or, at least, this latter element is present but transformed). It comes close to certain archetypal situations of conflict, like that of Faust, but humorously, lightly, in what at times reads like a parody. No Goethian blast shakes even the final pages that present the jaws of hell opening to receive the overweening Vathek. He is no defier of the gods like Prometheus, but, almost, a poor ingénu whose antics are always unpredictable. In the final analysis, the story works because it reads well; the style is lively and engaging, the various scenes are clearly depicted, and rarely there just to fill the page. The 100 pages that comprise Vathek are, furthermore, a heady concoction of wide-ranging erudition. Beckford’s text might benefit from a series of notes, and in fact the author himself did provide several. The problem is, however: where is the terror? Where is the supernatural? They are there, but burst like bubbles at the touch, while the narrator looks on in amusement. In the long run, the reader is dazzled and disorientated by the relentless onslaught of tricks and wizardry, and rabbits pulled from the author’s hat in all sizes and shapes. 3. Mahomet observes Vathek’s thirst for knowledge and his amateurish apotheosis, and stands back to see whether he will stop or continue until he is damned for it. The tower that Vathek builds is a clear allusion to Fonthill 5

The French text was republished, edited by F. Orlando, Venezia, in 1996.

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Abbey, which, because of the poor quality of the material used, collapsed, destroying the entire property (at the time of writing, Beckford was not to know that this would happen). From the very start, the narrator distances himself from the hero’s uncontrollable curiosity, and dispenses measured warnings on the possible consequences of his ambition. The Faustian parable, or, rather, parody, is given a grotesque twist: a repulsive, yellow-fanged stranger gives Vathek a sabre engraved with mysterious hieroglyphics that keep changing. Indeed Beckford’s story is, like Beckett’s, never far from slipping into bathos: Vathek issues a proclamation inviting whoever is daring enough to decipher the inscription on the blade of the sabre; he who tries and fails, ‘will have his beard burnt off to the last hair’. The hideous stranger is a kind of Mephistopheles, who appears to him again, and thrusts him into an endless infernal quest. The stranger, now called a Giaour (see Byron), becomes a kind of football everyone takes turns in kicking, with some of the kicks landing on the legs of Vathek himself, who is driven by his ambition to reach the Soliman’s palace, wherein are kept ‘the talismans that control the world’. Vathek, however, must deny Mahomet. When the Giaour demands a first proof of his abjuration in the form of the sacrifice of fifty young boys, we are reminded of Polyphemus, though Vathek is no Ulysses – or of Herod, or the Minotaur. Vathek’s mother, Carathis, is, in turn, a witch directly involved in the temptation to defy the divine and side with the powers of hell, ‘to which she had always been passionately attached’. She prepares a satanic rite in the form of a fire, on which, together with all sorts of disgusting inflammable material, numbers of innocent victims are heaped to further feed the flames. In the course of his anti-Bunyan progress, Vathek finds himself before the dwelling of the emir, Fakreddin. There follows a quite titillating scene of seduction by the girls of the harem who emerge from the bath in all their nakedness, mercilessly flouting the chief eunuch. It is almost like Pope in oriental mode. If Carathis, the mother, is a second diabolic agent – perhaps the secret mover behind her son’s damnation – Mahomet, from on high, sends his good genii to help Vathek, who is recklessly approaching the ‘palace of fire’, eager to take his seat on the throne of Soliman and ‘the pre-Adamitic sultans’, and where the Giaour/ Mephistopheles awaits him. In the fantastical infernal circle the damned

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drag themselves around with their hands on their hearts, which can be seen burning under the skin. Over them rules Eblis; the name is strange, suggestive, perhaps an anagram in some unknown tongue of the word ‘Satan’. Carathis, too, is engulfed in flames as soon as she appears. The narrating voice, at first subdued, now rises to pronounce stern words of warning, the least that could be expected in the circumstances. § 145. Other exponents of the novel of terror In the light of the huge international interest aroused by the ‘Gothic’ phenomenon, which has by now been examined in great depth and from every imaginable angle, I believe it is useful to take a step back, and see it in terms of the epistemological crisis at the heart of the Enlightenment. At the end of the eighteenth century, reason seems to breathe its last, overwhelmed by an outpouring of emotivism; after being repressed for such a long time, passionate feeling bursts loose in all its anarchic violence. So, for example, the French Revolution has some relation to Gothic in that it symbolizes and gives direction to this fundamental shift in European sensibility. One of the themes common to novelists, be they German, French or English (or, for that matter Italian, in the person of Manzoni) is the rebellion against a religion (usually Catholicism) that limits the freedom of the individual. This is usually represented, in these stories, by a priest or a nun forced against their will to embrace the religious life, and now engaged in a, usually successful, struggle for emancipation. In the footsteps of Diderot and de Sade, and of the Storm and Stress and Schauerroman, schools of novelists and poets, the English, and after them the Americans, came up with a suggestive mix of Shakespeare, Kyd, Webster and Milton, writers who had already sounded the depths of the dissociated psyche, the terrors of hallucination, and the fascination of the demonic. ‘Gothic’ is a label that covers many different phenomena, summed up by one of the most famous scholars of English Romanticism as ‘la carne, la morte e il diavolo’(‘the flesh, death, and the devil’), synthetically transformed in English into ‘the Romantic agony’. Praz pointed to the close relationship, in the motley make-up of the Gothic genre, of sadism, Faustism, Prometheism, algolagnia and various other forms of sexual aberration. David Punter, after Praz the greatest expert in this literary genre, wisely

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divides his study of the Gothic into two volumes,1 one dedicated to the background, and the second to the spreading of the form. As was said above, the Gothic is a mutating genre, still very much alive today, and more than ever capable of adapting to cultural and technological change. To remain within the limits of English literature and the period in question, it may be seen that especially after 1800, pure Gothic begins to flag, and becomes an important branch of sensational, ‘low-brow’ literature, looked down on by the establishment of letters. Above all, it becomes an instrument, a way towards other ends, and is used by apprentice writers to learn their trade, or as a diversion by writers who are not usually defined as ‘Gothic’. Late ‘terror’ novelists become the bedfellows of pure Romantics and post-Romantics, and monk and Giaour migrate to the pages of Shelley and Byron. Browning and even Tennyson2 dabbled young in the themes of Faustism and Prometheism, and Maturin’s Melmoth was widely read when both these poets were mere boys. The wake left by the Gothic fleet is long, and washes against Mary Shelley, Godwin, Coleridge, Keats, Polidori and the Brontë sisters. And that is just to halfway through the nineteenth century! 2. Women writers threw themselves into the Gothic with immense enthusiasm, merging it with the sentimental genre, in this way diluting the characteristic elements of Gothic and the supernatural. The unexceptional story, The Old English Baron, by Clara Reeve (1729–1807) was written in 1777 (and given this title in 1778). It opens with a provocative preface that appears to flatter Walpole but in fact distances the author from the ‘founder’ of the Gothic school: in it, Reeve states her intention to limit her use of medieval paraphernalia, and to stay within the boundaries of probability as she tells a story from the past in terms that are consonant with the present taste. Interestingly, Reeve mentions Richardson as one of the fountainheads of Gothic, in that mystery and the supernatural may be used to lead the attention of the reader to more useful ends. The story is set in the reign of Henry VI, but is written in modern English, apart from the inscription on the gravestone of the usurper, which is in late Middle 1 2

See § 142.2 n. 3. Volume 4, §§ 110 and 80.1.

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English. The only literary artifice is the discovery of a lost manuscript, with the additional realistic touches of certain parts of it being made illegible by time, thus leading to gaps in the story itself. Lovel, a baron, has been barbarously slain, and his ghost haunts one of the wings of the castle; the legitimate heir, Edmund, is a changeling who gradually discovers his true identity thanks to a deus ex machina, the bold knight, Philip, engaged in the French wars. It is significant that both Edmund’s father and his son bear the legendary name of Arthur.3 3. Two names, or, rather, two novels written twenty years apart fly the Gothic flag in the relative void between Mrs Radcliffe and the beginning of the Victorian era. Precocious and ambitious Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775–1818), usually referred to as ‘Monk’ Lewis, had already written a play when a boy (the play was actually performed not long after). An Oxford graduate, son of a senior civil servant, at the age of twenty-one he was already a member of Parliament. Eclectic and talented, he travelled widely in France and Germany and spoke both languages fluently, especially German, so much so that he was able to give an impromptu translation of Faust in the presence of Byron in 1816. As a writer, however, he was endowed, like Sheridan, with limited creativity, and many of his numerous plays and stories (labelled as ‘romantic’, or ‘tales of terror’) are adaptations or literal translations of existing texts. Lewis had no qualms in admitting he was a plagiarist, sometimes, indeed, a totally unconscious one. He specialized in Singspiel, a kind of operetta, half sung and half spoken. The 1797 Castle Spectre, perhaps his most famous play, does show dramatic skill and a sense of the theatre, though the style is rough and unpolished. This work initiated the custom of using animals, like cats and dogs, on stage. Anticipating Browning, Lewis composed a dramatic monologue described as ‘a madhouse scene’, which, when recited, is said to have made the audience distinctly uncomfortable. The funny thing is that Lewis was 3

The novels of Charlotte Smith (§ 168.3) are basically domestic and sentimental within a Gothic framework. The novel of terror becomes historical Gothic, or psychic à la Richardson, with the two sisters Harriet (1757–1851) and, especially, Sophia Lee (1750–1824). The latter’s The Recess is an epistolary novel on the two daughters of Mary Stuart who were persecuted by Queen Elizabeth.

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an abolitionist, although he owned cotton plantations in Jamaica that flourished thanks to slave labour. Lewis’s alibi was that emancipation would lead to a blood-bath. He died young after catching typhoid fever during a return journey from the Caribbean. The Monk (1796), condemned as an instigation to revolution in the wake of events in France, and a manifesto against religion, was ‘sanitized’ in later editions, with many scenes of sadistic violence and torture cut to avoid problems with censorship. By some, The Monk is considered a masterpiece, thanks also to the parodic structure of textual references to the pre-existing canon of Gothic tales and the balladry of German pre-Romanticism; for others it is the raw, unpleasant debut of an under-age writer. Browning famously returned to the same subject with his monk in the Spanish cloister,4 an ideal taking up of the baton passed on by Lewis. Even a brutally synthetic summary of the plot is sufficient to show the diabolical psychological connection between Roman Catholicism as a cause of explosions and implosions, and the chain that binds the oppressive regime of monastery and convent to sexual obsession, rape, and murder as a way to hide the evidence of guilt. Mrs Radcliffe gave Lewis the model with her Montoni, and challenged him with her own Schedoni a year later. The dark, oppressive atmosphere of the Monk can be matched only by Charlotte Brontë’s Villette. In the course of time, a whole galaxy swam into sight of ‘Lewisian’ cataloguers and annotators, moved by an ‘unwieldy and largely futile erudition’,5 which, if nothing else, shows how much the various Gothic novelists read, and copied, each others’ works. The first few lines of Lewis’s novel show just how melodramatic it is: all sense of truth to life is lacking, while the false, phony and second-hand abound. The story begins in the cathedral in Madrid, where a vast crowd of clergy and faithful are awaiting the sermon of the Superior of the Capuchins, Father Ambrosio, who struts solitary, 4 5

Volume 4, § 115.2. PRA, 106, n. 63 of the Italian edition, not reproduced in the English translation. Lewis, a homosexual obsessed with androgyny, is repeatedly and morbidly attentive in the novel to the whiteness of the female breast, especially if seen but not touched. The sight of Antonia’s breast (The Monk, vol. II, chapter IV), and the nipples that have been nibbled by a finch, is worthy of Pope.

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enjoying his fame and prestige. This whole setting will be overturned only fifty years later: the life of the cloister is a den of repressed vice, novices and nuns nothing but captives of the convent, yet Christina Rossetti and Hopkins will extol those very prisoners of wall and veil that here are so clearly disapproved of. Indeed, the veil is raised to show the milk-white flesh of a pretty young girl in the cathedral. The melodramatic character of the novel is further evinced from the speed and hastiness with which the erotic temptation lays hold of the preacher, and in the immediate punishment of an infringement of the rule of ecclesiastical chastity (a nun, Agnes, is pregnant); he little knows that he is about to commit a similar sin. Now, melodrama does have a fascination of its own, and sometimes does work. Androgynous Rosario unveils as a woman who desires him, and at once the Father is overcome by lust at the sight of the woman’s breasts. Ambrosio must realize that the revered portrait of the Madonna was modelled on Matilda (formerly Rosario), and that she has placed it in his cell imagining the overlapping of earthly and heavenly saints so dear to writers like Crashaw.6 The sequence comes to a head when Matilda, like a vampire, sucks the blood together with the poison from the mortal wound (so Ambrosio believes) of the monk, who has been bitten by a snake. It ends with the monk giving in to the raptures of the flesh. The next section presents the parallel story of Lorenzo, brother of Agnes, the pregnant nun – Agnes, whose condition the abbesses and superiors do all they can to hide. Lorenzo loves Antonia (see the beginning of the novel), at first in vain. In keeping with the Gothic fashion of interpolated stories, we are presented with the long, wandering tale of a ‘bleeding nun’, one of the many forced to take the veil, and now reduced to haunting the rooms of a German castle, to be exorcized only when her bones have been found and buried. The rest of the story sees Ambrosio tiring of Matilda and becoming infatuated with Antonia; helped by Matilda and a few satanic rites, he becomes a rival to Lorenzo. The structure of most Gothic novels, even such an unusual one as Lewis’s, entails the punishment of the wicked; at the 6

Incidentally, the fact that this portrait is said to have been painted by an inexistent Venetian painter, Galuppi, once again points towards Browning.

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end, Ambrosio is revealed to have a quite terrible criminal record (vying with the darkest of Elizabethan or Jacobean dramas, it transpires that he has committed incest with his sister and killed his mother). After a whole series of twists and surprises, the monk is hauled before the tribunal of the Inquisition and the civil authorities, then handed over to Satan, who mocks him, and deposited, like Prometheus, on a mountain peak, where he dies in the space of a week. The good are rewarded, and the defrocked nun, saved at the last moment from a horrifying death in the dungeons, is led to the altar by her beloved. 4. Charles Maturin (1782–1824), Irish through and through, great-uncle to Oscar Wilde, Anglican priest tormented by Calvinist terrors (significantly, he declared himself of Huguenot origin, as witnessed by his surname), tried to convince his contemporaries that he wrote only for profit, or, rather, to allow his wife to live in the kind of luxury more suited to a wealthy if dubious aristocracy. Whatever the reason, the fact is that he was a dismal failure at making money. He is attributed a host of extravagances, oddities, whims and tics. In Dublin he was on everyone’s lips, and must have cut a figure not dissimilar to that of J. C. Mangan;7 in the end he was a bitterly frustrated man, and was rumoured to have died from an overdose of some medicine or other.8 Several exterior signs connect him to Lewis – for example, his involvement in the theatre; but Maturin is far more of a writer. His three tragedies, of which the best is Bertram (1816), were judged to be a trifle pompous, high-sounding and pretentious by such authoritative contemporaries as Coleridge and Hazlitt. Preceded by four inferior attempts at narrative, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) was followed by another, less successful novel, written and published in the year of his death. For a start, it must be said that the structure of Melmoth, so carefully crafted, acrobatic and quite literally

7 8

This comparison has been re-proposed by the authors of the two most recent books on Maturin (cf. below, n. 8). Recent ‘colonial’ readings (cf. the review in TLS, 16 March 2012, 3) emphasize the figure of a Protestant obsessed with being surrounded and engulfed by Irish Catholicism, especially in two of the four novels that precede Melmoth.

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amazing, had never been seen before. Cervantes and the Arabian Nights are often cited as comparisons, but most of all there is an undeniable, brilliant anticipation of Wuthering Heights: the same mechanism of Chinese boxes, or ‘tunnel effect’, a story broken up into a number of sub-stories inserted one into the other and moving through time and space, with one narrator handing over to another. It is a miracle of marquetry or mosaics, all centred on the figure of the hero, Melmoth, who has tried, so far without success, to lead his fellow men into the ways of evil, making them participants in the pact stipulated with Satan, 150 years of immortality in exchange for their souls. The structure of the novel is open to the criticism of being merely a tour de force of formal acrobatics rather than a work of genius, and it was indeed judged in these terms. Some critics invoke an abridged version of what they call an indigestible tome that rivals Richardson in length. Maturin employs a number of tricks and devices, like the erudite footnote, the pedantic quotation inserted in the text, or the learned digression as in an essay-cum-novel. Despite all these drawbacks, Melmoth became very popular and was to reappear as a nominal presence and vague echo without specific identifying signs or in-depth discussions of the text itself, except for Balzac. The opinions on Maturin’s novel expressed by famous literary figures would fill a whole book. Praz saw quite clearly that its success was due to the condensation and amalgam of archetypes or popular myths, like Goethe’s Mephistopheles, the Byronic hero, the wandering Jew, the vampire, and so on.9 The theme of Faust comes out fully only towards the end of the novel: captured by Lucifer, Melmoth is swallowed up by the waves, his destiny the opposite of that of Lewis’s monk (swallowed up in a sea of fire), without finding anyone to share his pact with the devil. The message is, in extremis, optimistic, taken as it is from Goethe. Those who see in Maturin a student of brainwashing and of extreme cases of neurological pathology, and a precursor of Poe and Le Fanu, Kafka, Orwell and Koestler, point out that, after all, the whole weight of the novel rests on the account of the Spaniard, Monçada: in more than three hundred pages (out of 700), the story is told, in excruciating slow motion, of an attempted brainwashing carried out by satanic representatives of the Jesuit order.

9

PRA, 117.

§ 146. Burke

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§ 146. Burke As in the case of his fellow-Irishman, Sheridan, the artistic and literary career of Edmund Burke (1729–1797) was intended as a preparation for a life in politics. Born of a Protestant father (a small time Dublin solicitor) and a Catholic mother,1 he studied at Trinity College, Dublin, then went to London at the age of twenty, and for nine years was a member of the Middle Temple, the breeding ground of poets and playwrights from the days of Marston and Donne. His only literary endeavours, however, were a satire against Bolingbroke, in which Burke defended religion by means of a reductio ad absurdum of the very reasoning used to attack it (his irony was to be misunderstood, as was Defoe’s in his The Shortest Way with the Dissenters), and, in the same year (1756) A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.2 Often treated with unwarranted disdain by English historians who prefer Burke the orator and political thinker, the Enquiry is seen by other critics as hugely important, especially with regard to the late eighteenth-century aesthetics of terror, and therefore the Gothic and Romantic movements. It must be admitted that this product of a very young man strikes one as incongruous in a career almost entirely dedicated to politics; and, in fact, Burke never did anything else in the field of literature. In recent years he tends to be ignored in literary discourse and studied only as an expression of the history of politics and religious controversies. Here I intend to look at the Enquiry ‘organically’, so to speak, placing it in some kind of perspective: after all, Burke’s text does deal with works and literary ‘movements’ that I have already discussed, such as the Gothic or Terror novel, ‘night poetry’, the nature poetry and graveyard meditations of Thomson and Gray, while other important cultural phenomena lie further back and exert a formative pressure on Burke’s text. Take, for example, Longinus’ De Sublimitate, which he read in his time at Trinity: the anti-Aristotelian rules regulating the use of exaggerated imagery, enthusiasm, and wild, daring concepts. The difference between the beautiful and the sublime is thus expressed: the beautiful exercises a soothing effect on the perceiver, producing a merely superficial sensation

1 2

His sister was a Catholic, as was his wife, who became an Anglican after her marriage. Revised and enlarged two years later.

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of pleasure, while the sublime possesses a power that can uplift, frighten, and, sometimes, destroy. The two might seem to be different degrees of the same phenomenon, but in reality they are quite different. In the analysis of the two, the framework remains Aristotelian and fourfold, and consists of the succession of formal, material, efficient and final causes; in both cases, the final, or primary, cause is divine providence, in other words, God. In the case of the sublime, the material and efficient causes change, but not the final. Burke lists and analyses those qualities in nature that favour the sublime by creating wonder and astonishment: phenomena like density, depth, hugeness, darkness. Anything that may be defined as clear, bright, sharply defined, geometrical, is not sublime. From a physiological point of view, the perception of beauty calms and relaxes the nerves, while in the presence of the sublime they are stretched and, therefore, vibrate. The emotion produced by the sublime is distinct and strong, but is also a mixture of pleasure and pain. The final, fifth part deals with nature poetry, which consists of words that do not evoke the ideas of things, but, anticipating symbolisme, set in motion a series of free associations, thus bringing into question the age-old concept of art as imitation.3 2. Putting aesthetics to one side, it is generally accepted as a fact that Burke was the greatest political speaker, if not exactly statesman or ideologue, that England has ever had, the only problem being that his speeches were more effective when read than spoken, owing to a slight speech defect (according to his biographer Morley). In the long run, this proves to be an advantage for Burke’s reputation, since other ‘great orators’ are considered so on the basis of oral tradition, but have left little or nothing in writing to prove their greatness. The attention given to Burke in the history books – far more than that given to the average literary author – is largely due to the fact that, living as he did in a crucial period of European, and, therefore, English, history, he could not but pronounce on events that, still today, interest, intrigue and concern English national identity (America, India, and, above all, Ireland). Another explanation behind the continuing attention paid to Burke is that English literary history is all-inclusive, 3

Hence the immediate repercussions on Ossianism, and mediated in the visual and pictorial arts – Fuseli, Blake – and synthesized for the first time by Praz (SLI, 395–9).

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and therefore takes into consideration, as well, questions of culture and civilization. In Burke, art (in the sense of a literary activity begun and then abandoned) and politics reach a symbiosis in his transformation of his private and public life into an artistic work. His enormous output of writings4 has been pored over by armies of scholars starting with Saintsbury; notes have been meticulously made on the mingling of stylistic registers, from the very low to the elegantly erudite, pithy aphorisms and lengthy sentences, the consummate use of every trick and device in his well-stocked rhetorical toolbox. The most salient, and aggressive, aspect of Burke’s style is a ‘call to arms’ against the enemy – be it his or England’s. He feels the need to conjure up an adversary to fight against, at times exaggerating the threat and danger in a manner approaching his definition of the sublime. He saw himself as engaged in a daily struggle ‘for freedom’, a fighter ‘in whose heart no vehement and lasting rage was ever felt except against what he judged to be tyranny.’ The summing up of his life, written shortly before he died, reads like the parting speech of the hero of one of Marlowe’s plays: ‘My sanguine hopes are blasted, and I must consign my feelings on that terrible disappointment to the same patience in which I have been obliged to bury the vexation I suffered on the defeat of the other great, just, and honourable causes in which I have had some share, and which have given more of dignity than of peace and advantage to a long laborious life’. He died fearing that a dishonourable peace was about to be signed with France, already poised for a destructive crusade.5 The ‘terrible disappointment’ refers to the shattered hopes of Catholic emancipation in Ireland. 3. Burke was a man torn between conflicting forces, judging from the evident contradictions in his arguments on any concrete subject. His early aesthetics is Romantic and anti-classical, while his adult political position is conservative, and, therefore, also ‘classical’. But his political involvement is expressed in fierce battles conveyed in the style of literary epic, heroic tragedy, and solemn address. The political Burke is ‘sublime’ because he uses only vague, set formulas, pure pre-emptive intuition. He states he is against 4 5

Collected in a recent edition, edited by J. P. Marshall et al., 9 vols, Oxford 1981–2000. In one of his most famous passages, on the death of Marie Antoinette, Burke mourns the passing of ‘the age of chivalry’.

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all systematizing ideology, and is therefore characterized by impulsiveness and instinct. Praxis dictates theory, not the other way round. It makes sense that Burke is out of place in a history of philosophy, because he kicked against theory. On the other hand, he might be considered as theorizing the necessary absence of theory, or, in other words, the subordination of theory to practice. More specifically, he was a gradualist, for whom every change in a given order had to preserve and safeguard the status quo and take place within it. The French Revolution was, above all, an interruption. If politics bows to morality, Burke is opposed to Machiavelli and Hobbes, and agrees with Rousseau.6 Yet he is also against the neo-Puritanism of revolutionaries who aim to bring down the existing state and build a new one based on some abstract pattern. In this light, Robespierre was a new Machiavelli.7 The weakness and arbitrariness of Burke’s position reach their height when he states that the ideals of the French Revolution are possible only in the imagination, while in America and Ireland what was happening was feasible ‘reform’. Paine challenged Burke in words that echoed round the world, saying ‘he pitied the feathers but ignored the dying bird’. 4. In 1759, Burke was appointed secretary to the Secretary for Ireland, and from 1765 until his death he sat in Parliament. In his thirty years of activity, five were the areas that saw him dominating the scene with his powers of oratory.8 As soon as he was appointed he spoke against George II’s decree that made ministers answerable to the Crown rather than to Parliament, but his real debut came in 1774–1775 when he came out in favour of the American rebels on the question of taxation (two speeches, one of which was On American Taxation). He energetically opposed the embargo on Irish trade and helped to curb anti-Catholic feeling aroused by the Gordon Riots of 1780. He supported good government, lashing out against corruption and

6

7 8

If one did not know that it was by Burke, the definition of the social contract might be taken for the work of a medieval mystic, or Vaughan or Traherne: in other words, it was the copy of a primeval contract and a link between supernature and nature sanctioned by ‘an inviolable oath’ that holds the whole of creation together. On the use of the adjective, ‘primeval’, by another Irish author, Goldsmith, cf. § 114.2. H. J. C. Grierson, in CHI, vol. XI, 32. BAUGH, vol. III, 1090.

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exploitation; both he and Sheridan wore themselves out in their ten-year crusade against Warren Hastings, accused of mismanagement and corruption while governor of Bengal. Hastings was subsequently impeached, only to be acquitted seven years later by the House of Lords. Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), in the form of a letter to a French nobleman, contradicts the two American speeches in that the latter are in favour of freedom while the former apparently approves of tyranny and repressive government. What Burke did was to apply the law of the legitimacy of change within a continuum, in one case, and, in the other, the illegitimacy of total and outright revolution.9 § 147. Macpherson The medieval setting of the false ‘Ossian poems’ of James Macpherson (1736–1796) is not to be identified with the Arthurian world of noble knights in shining armour, moated castles, dungeons, and terrifying incursions of the supernatural; nor does it resemble the later epistemological and ideological medievalism dear to Hopkins, or the more purely imitative version of Morris and Swinburne. The ‘Ossian poems’ refer back to an earlier date, to the very early middle ages and beyond, to the late Roman era, and further still to the Celts that predated the Angles, Saxons and Jutes in their settlement on the British Isles. Fingal (1761) and Temora (1763), published together in 1765 under the title of The Poems of Ossian, were passed off by Macpherson as translations from the Gaelic of poems by a legendary poet-warrior by the name of Ossian, most of them found in the Scottish Highlands where they survived in the oral tradition, and transcribed directly from the mouths of Gaelic speakers.1 Macpherson was twenty-five years old at the time, a farmer’s son, who graduated from the University of Aberdeen, had worked as a schoolmaster and tutor, and was

9

The French Revolution led to a great resurgence of extemporary collective publications, in the manner of the Marprelate Tracts, in the periodical The Anti-Jacobin (1798–1799).

1

Ossian lived in the third century AD, but the manuscripts dated from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries.

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befriended by the playwright, John Home, the author of Douglas,2 who encouraged him in his Ossian venture, together with the Scottish poet and linguist, Hugh Blair. The latter contributed an enthusiastic ‘Dissertation’ to the 1765 edition of the Poems. Macpherson had already written a work full of Ossianic anticipations, which had met, however, with no success whatever. After the huge clamour produced by The Poems of Ossian, he wisely decided to change direction, and produced a prose translation of the Iliad, a number of ballads on the clan wars in Scotland, and a history of England. So, was there anything authentic in the ‘Ossian Poems’? Experts disagree about how much Gaelic Macpherson actually knew, but there is no doubt that he had at his disposal a substantial amount of material, much of it fragmentary, belonging to folk tradition culture, which he inserted in an epic setting of his own invention, producing, so he believed, a kind of Scottish Iliad. The final result was the fruit of adaptation, expansion, and re-modelling of existing material. There was a widespread conviction that Ossian was indeed ‘the Homer of the north’. Famously, Dr Johnson challenged Macpherson to show him the Ossianic originals; they were not forthcoming. The Poems were declared to be a fraud after Macpherson’s death, but in the meantime the northern Homer’s fame had crossed the Channel and the whole of Europe was in the grip of ‘Ossianmania’. 2. One of Macpherson’s objectives in the Ossian affair was to revaluate and restore the ancient national identity of the Scots,3 who, as we have seen on various occasions in the course of this volume, were looked down upon in London, and often the target of jibes, jokes and abuse. Macpherson came from a Jacobite family, and had not forgotten witnessing as a young man the savage punishment handed out to the followers of the Pretender. Ancient Celtic civilization had its own ethics and its own code of honour; the publication of a volume based on an important historical-cum-legendary

2 3

§ 140.3. Quite wrongly, from a historical point of view, and quite deliberately, it was stated that the ancient Highlanders were, not Irish colonists, but natives of Caledonia. Cf. in this regard, the scathing review of a recent edition of the poems (The Poems of Ossian and Related Works, ed. H. Gaskill, Edinburgh 1996), in TLS (29 March 1996, 25).

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figure like Ossian would be an effective rebuttal to those who held the Scots to be an inferior race devoid of history and traditions. Clearly, a great Gaelic epic did exist, waiting to be rediscovered, along with the deep roots of historical and cultural tradition. Ten years before (1755), Jerome Stone had given the first translation of a Gaelic ballad. It was read by almost no-one, except Macpherson, whose forgeries were to become enormously more popular than this authentic text.4 But then, Ossian’s was a voice that chimed with the times, and picked up on the growing criticism of eighteenth-century rationalism. If eighteenth-century civilization was synonymous with progress, Celtic civilization represented primitivism, and was not so different from the values celebrated in Anglo-Saxon poetry – patriotism, the family, friendship, loyalty – so distant from the corruption of the present day. Quite independently, Macpherson supplied an ideal text for Burke’s sublime, placing the deeds of his heroes in settings that epitomize the statutory gloom, mist, blurred outlines, not to mention ruined castles and revered relics.5 A final word on the style: far from erudite or bookish, it is, one might say, minimalistic; and yet not without an almost imperceptible amalgam of echoes from the Bible, Milton and Dissenting homiletics, along with touches of poetic diction ranging from the epic to the elegiac. As early as 1763, Cesarotti brought out an Italian translation of the poems, to the delight of Foscolo and Leopardi.6 Continuing its ascent undimmed in the skies of the early nineteenth century, Ossian’s star reached its zenith with Schiller and with Goethe, who included some of the fragments in Werther. At the end of the eighteenth century, a transitional 4 5

6

DAI, vol. II, 680. This derivation is underlined in Blair’s Dissertation, when he says he does not know of any more sublime passage than the struggle of Ossian with the Spirit of Loda. The syntactic measure of the Ossian poems is largely paratactic, the paragraphs being split into small units, often consisting of only subject, verb and object. The songs of Selma are a lyrical Sehnsucht of evocations and invocations following a model of chanting and repetition, placed in a windy, stormy, almost lunar setting. The six books of Fingal (all in all, monotonous and full of bluster) are preceded by synopses summarizing the complicated sequence of battles between the Scots and the Irish invaders, whose war councils are often interrupted by the recounting of tales. PSL, 392–3, has an impressive critical summary of the two main poems.

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mythology was needed between neoclassical Hellenism and Romanticism, which, as yet, lacked a mythology of its own. The late Romanticism of Yeats and other Irish writers reconnected with this root, and Finn Mc Cumhal is a hero both in Macpherson and in Joyce. § 148. Percy and the ‘Reliques of English Poetry’ The cases of Macpherson and Bishop Thomas Percy (1736–1811) bear witness to the authentic craze for ‘antiquarianism’ and archaeology that appeared round about the middle of the century. Stirrings of the imminent fashion had been seen already in Scotland with the collection of fragments of ancient ballads gathered by Watson and Ramsay,1 while in England some anthologies had been prepared by D’Urfey and Capell, a collection of ancient ballads had been published in 1723, and The Muses’ Library in 1737. Evidently, their appearance was precocious, and they soon passed into oblivion. Most of the afore-mentioned ballads were native to the so-called Borders that lie between England and Scotland, hence the predominant Scottish presence. It was not rare – we will see this again when we come to Scott – for an eager collector to visit various parts of the realm in order to hear from the living voice of some old man or woman songs or tales handed down through numberless generations, or for some other ‘antiquary’ to rummage through drawers and cupboards, attics and basements, of this or that castle or manse, and to come up with ancient manuscripts of unimaginable value. One of these last-minute ‘rescues’ involved Marvell’s poems.2 Bishop Percy happened to be visiting Humphrey Pitt of Shifnal, in Shropshire, just as a maid was about to light a fire using the pages of the Folio (alas, no longer complete) which, snatched from her hand, formed the basis for the compilation of The Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. The rescued manuscript dated from the seventeenth century and contained ballads, songs and verse romances. Percy, a grocer’s son who had gone to Oxford, and then become a clergyman, already had a considerable background in linguistics, philology and translation. He had edited and translated a Chinese novel,

1 2

§ 154.2. § 25.1.

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albeit not from the original, and had translated, directly from Icelandic, Five Pieces of Runic Poetry. It was in the early 1760s that he began to take an interest in ancient manuscripts, half-heartedly helped in this activity by his friend, Dr Johnson. His promotion to elevated ecclesiastical positions (from 1782 he was bishop of Dromore, in Ireland, and is often referred to by this title) did not interfere with his philological activities. In 1770 his Northern Antiquities was published, containing the first English version of the Edda, although not translated from the original. 2. It was no coincidence that Percy’s anthology appeared in the same year as the Ossian poems. Medieval troubadours and minstrels were the next link in the poetic chain of popular tradition after the Celtic bards. Percy was more of a philologist than Macpherson, but even he was little more than an amateur. The Reliques is a bit of a hotchpotch: along with authentic fragments in the original are found poems by contemporaries (like Shenstone) and even some of Percy’s own. A note informs us that Percy ‘improved’ thirty-five out of the forty-six ballads in the Folio. It is significant that the collection is referred to as ‘Reliques’, meaning ‘what is left’, rather than the entire corpus. Percy was later to disparage the religious connotations of the word used. As to the ragbag quality of the whole, he points out that rough and unpolished medieval pieces were deliberately alternated with more elegant and polished compositions, no doubt for the good of the reader. The Enlightenment framework emerges in the dedication, which describes a gradual progress from barbarism towards civilization, from roughness to elegance, and from ignorance and instinct towards the ideal of the cultivated man of the eighteenth century. Coleridge, Scott and, in part, Wordsworth were only the most important among the many to whom Percy showed the way forward. The widespread appeal of Reliques is proved by the rapid succession of editions. The first, in 1765, was followed in 1767 by a second, then a third in 1775, and a fourth in 1794, edited, this time, by the author’s grandson. The so-called ‘Percy Folio’ was published in a critical edition by Furnivall in 1867. With Percy, folk poetry became respectable, thanks also to the scholars that were part of the German Romantic movement. In fact, it was pronounced superior to ‘learned’ poetry, and led to a surge of interest in folklore as a whole. The anthology itself is both a photograph of early literary history and a laboratory for future developments, since it

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contains in microcosm many of the great poetic works to come. Among the ballads taken up by later writers is the one put in the mouth of George Barnwell in Lillo’s The London Merchant, or the more famous Lilliburlero or Lillibullero, sung or whistled by Uncle Toby on just about every page of Tristram Shandy. But, above all, the Reliques forced the Romantic poets to recognize the nature and importance of the metres, themes and tropes of the ballad form, in the sense of a wide-ranging but fast-moving account of events that might be commonplace or fantastical, hard-hitting or ingenuous, sometimes humorous, often seasoned with strange, arcane rites, but all in jogging stanzas complete with refrain. The old, exhausted, self-obsessed kind of poetry, the court satire or historical-epic poem, the eulogy and the elegy, all this musty old repertoire was challenged by a different kind of poetry with new characters and new deeds. § 149. Chatterton The life of Thomas Chatterton (1752–1770), the poet who took possession of the Romantic and post-Romantic imagination if anyone ever did, was so short, troubled and meteoric that it ought to be measured, not so much in years, as in months and days. His literary career developed at twice, thrice, four times the speed of ordinary mortals; he seized every moment, every instant, as though he knew in his bones he would be dead before he reached eighteen. He was born three months after the death of his father, who had been a schoolmaster and sub-chanter at Bristol, where the Chatterton family had for 200 years been sacristans in the Gothic church of St Mary Redcliffe. Starting in 1760 he spent eight years as a pupil in a ‘blue-coat school’, attended principally by orphans, where he stood out as a particularly aboulic, almost autistic child, we would say today. In reality, from the age of twelve, he had immersed himself in an imaginary world, the world of fifteenth-century Bristol, where Mayor Canning was a patron of the arts.1 This private mythology of his, this second life, had arisen from his rummaging in various old chests in the sacristies of St Mary’s, brim-full of dusty parchments and manuscripts, some of them missing pages torn out to cover

1

Bristol, at the time the second largest city in England, was traditionally considered the gateway to the West, and the romantic bulwark of the English against invaders.

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books or be used by his mother in her work as a seamstress. It was at this early age that the imaginary figure of the fifteenth-century monk, Thomas Rowley, was born, who was to become Chatterton’s alias when he wrote his first imaginary dialogue. Carlo Izzo was, I think, right to call this fraud ‘a boyish prank’, and, indeed, shortly after, Chatterton played another trick on two worthy burghers of the town, selling them, for some modest fee, some concocted, and therefore quite worthless, genealogical charts. In 1767 – he was only fifteen – he found work as an apprentice clerk in a solicitor’s office. This left him a lot of free time, which he employed in copying out, from supposed manuscripts in his father’s keeping, poems signed by his alias, Rowley, which he then sent to the publisher, Dodsley, and later to Horace Walpole. At first, Walpole enthused over them, but then he showed them to Gray and other friends, who pronounced them to be false. Deep down, Chatterton was practical and sharp, and at sixteen was able to gauge the demands of the literary market; in fact he was a regular contributor to various radical periodicals of the capital. But he lived in Bristol, and London was the only place where one could make a living as a writer. Early in 1770 he drew up his will, and included in it a number of threats that he would commit suicide if he was not freed from his indentures at the solicitor’s. He arrived in London in April 1770, and, in order to make a living, threw himself headlong into writing all sorts of things, mainly in imitation of the fashionable writers of the day. An ante litteram Joyce. He even wrote a ‘musical drama’, which may have been staged. Chatterton was, without doubt, one of the many writers caught and destroyed by the implacable grind of Grub Street: he got either nothing or a mere pittance for his newspaper articles. His most famous Rowleyan poem, the first using his alias after a long break, was turned down by publishers, to Chatterton’s chagrin. Other projects, such as becoming a ship’s doctor, came to nothing. Until twenty years ago it was believed that, on 24 August 1770, after being in London for only two months, Chatterton, smitten in his pride and reduced to poverty, in a fit of depression and selfdestruction, took an overdose of arsenic after burning all his writings in his squalid lodging in Holborn. He was seventeen years and nine months old. Chatterton’s suicide was a given for his contemporaries and the following generation: they would have been appalled at the slightest doubt as to the cause of his death, because he had become the symbol of the quintessential poet dying before his time, perhaps abandoned by his muse and destined by

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his very nature to perish in a hostile world in the flower of his youth. Except that recent research has destroyed this myth, proving that Chatterton’s death was not suicide but an unfortunate accident, and the medicine used a cure for some unspecified sexual disease. The fascination of the figure of Chatterton, however, has remained intact, helped by the regular appearance, at intervals of approximately every ten years, of some creative revisitations of the myth. The latest of these is Peter Ackroyd’s novel, Chatterton.2 2. The so-called Rowley poems were published by Tyrwhitt in 1777 and again in 1778, after animated discussions as to their authenticity, which concluded with the admission that they were, in fact, forgeries. This is the text that created the Romantic icon of the poet, and led Wordsworth to award him the accolade of ‘marvellous boy’; that struck Coleridge so deeply, induced De Vigny to write a drama of the same name, and inspired the painter, Henry Wallis, to produce, almost a century later, his Death of Chatterton, using a finer looking model than the poet himself – the young George Meredith. The Romantics looked on Chatterton, as I mentioned, as an embodiment of pure poetic inspiration, while the Victorians, shifting the emphasis onto the essentially ‘unreal’ nature of poetry, saw in him a predecessor.3 Dante Gabriel Rossetti collaborated with Skeat in 1871 on an edition, itself another ‘forgery’, which translated ‘Rowley’s’ archaisms into modern English. Chatterton had not, in reality, created just an isolated and extemporary imitation, but an articulate linguistic system and a totally artificial idiolect. In 1819 Keats noted, perspicaciously, that ‘Chatterton is the purest writer in the English language’. The actual printing of the ‘Rowley poems’ suppressed an essential component like the parchment paper on which the original manuscripts were written, the ancient handwriting and the illuminated initial letters – all elements of a work of art rather than, as Benjamin would say, a reproducible product. So it has always been stated that Chatterton is as distant from Macpherson as he is from Chaucer, since he created a similar neo-language with its own phonetic and morphological idiosyncrasies. There are, it is true, several major metrical and lexical anachronisms, given that the fake fifteenth-century poet uses Elizabethan modules. The nearness to Chaucer is purely alphabetical, since Chatterton employs his 2 3

Cf. Volume 8, § 189.2 n. 11. Cf. my discussion of Browning’s essay on Chatterton (1842) in Volume 4, § 109.1.

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language but not his text.4 The ‘Rowley poems’ are full of endless interludes and ballads dealing with the mythologies of the Saxon and Norman invasions and other deeds of old; Chatterton sent the publisher, Dodsley, his tragedy Aella, judging it to be ‘perfect’ thanks also to the interpolated songs. Goddwynn and two parallel ballads (more than a thousand lines between them) are based on the battle of Hastings. Eclogues, romaunts and, above all, the ‘Excelente Balade of Charitie’, present charming decorative elements, prevalently paratactic, but also contain many quite banal observations, a taste going back to Spenser that will be much appreciated by Keats and Rossetti. The second of the two volumes of editions of Chatterton’s works is usually given over to poems written by the poet in his own name, a further sign that Chatterton was capable of donning and doffing his disguise at will, and of turning his hand to political satire and engagé poetry. § 150. Cowper* Like Chatterton, William Cowper (1731–1800), much loved by the Romantics,1 but no forger, was often referred to as ‘poor Cowper’, owing to certain biographical analogies. Chatterton was for centuries thought to have committed suicide, while Cowper certainly tried to kill himself at 4

The edition of Chaucer he had at his disposal was that of Speght (1598).

*

The Poems of William Cowper, ed. J. D. Baird and C. Ryskamp, 3 vols, Oxford 1980– 1995. Letters and Prose Writings, ed. J. King and C. Ryskamp, 5 vols, Oxford 1979– 1986. H. I’Anson Fausset, William Cowper, London 1928; D. Cecil, The Stricken Deer; or, The Life of Cowper, London 1929, Indianapolis, IN 1930; G. Thomas, William Cowper and the Eighteenth Century, London 1935, rev. 1948; L. C. Hartley, William Cowper, Humanitarian, Chapel Hill, NC 1938; A. Zanco, Vita e poesia di W. Cowper, Milano 1949; N. Nicholson, William Cowper, London 1951; M. J. Quinlan, William Cowper: A Critical Life, Minneapolis, MN 1953; R. Huang, William Cowper: Nature Poet, London 1957; M. Golden, In Search of Stability: The Poetry of William Cowper, New York 1960; W. Norris Free, William Cowper, New York 1970; V. Newey, Cowper’s Poetry: A Critical Study and Reassessment, Liverpool 1982; B. Hutchings, The Poetry of William Cowper, London and Canberra 1983; M. Priestman, Cowper’s ‘Task’: Structure and Influence, Cambridge and New York 1983; J. King, William Cowper: A Biography, Durham, NC 1986.

1

See Southey’s 1837 historical biography.

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least twice. As I mentioned, the former probably died from an accidental overdose, unanimously interpreted as suicide, while the latter died at the age of sixty-nine, in all likelihood of gout, at the end of a life lived on the borderline between sanity and madness. A number of quite ordinary personal and professional crises proved disastrous for someone already predisposed to paranoia and mental instability. Taine sums it up well: ‘Poor charming soul, perishing like a fragile flower transplanted from a warm land to the snow.’2 A portrait of him by Romney has often been studied and interrogated for possible psychosomatic indications. It has also been stated that in his case, sanity and madness were two distinctly separate states, whereas in Blake they were interpenetrating. It was easy, in a still ‘innocent’ age, to pronounce the diagnosis of effeminacy, and mask homosexuality under the more acceptable label of ‘lack of vigour’. The son of a clergyman, he lost his mother at the age of six. At school, he was probably bullied by other boys. At the age of twenty he was in London, studying law. He courted two cousins and was wisely advised against marrying one of them, Theodora, to whom he dedicated a huge number of poems idealizing her under the name of Delia, in the manner of the sonneteers of the 1590s, but not without irony and gleams of humour. He was dismissed from his post as solicitor, and, in 1759, appointed ‘commissioner of bankruptcies’. During an examination for a sinecure at the House of Lords he had what may have been a panic attack, and was unable to answer any of the questions put to him. He attempted suicide and was committed to an asylum for two years. On his release, he was taken in by the Reverend Unwin and his family in the village of Olney, and was entrusted to the spiritual care of the Dissenting pastor, John Newton. The cure turned out to be worse than the disease, since the Calvinist doctrine he was administered led him to believe he was the only one of the whole human race predestined to be damned (during a ‘fatal’ dream in the night of 24 January 1773 he heard a voice saying ‘Actum est de te, periisti’). Once again he tried to take his own life. Unlike the nineteenth-century Samuel Butler, Cowper never succeeded in freeing himself completely from the shackles of Calvinism, nor did he spark a 2

TAI, vol. III, 417. Cf. D. Cook, Thomas Chatterton and Neglected Genius, 1760–1830, Basingstoke and New York 2013.

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posthumous campaign against religious repression and indoctrination. The rest of his life was spent just existing: like many who suffer from mental illness, he could settle down to nothing, and wasted his time taking walks, or pottering about in the garden. He even did a bit of carpentry.3 Withdrawal from the world was seen as a therapeutic necessity, but in fact was a kind of prison he longed to break out of in order to return to ordinary life and make himself useful. The poem entitled ‘The Solitude of Alexander Selkirk’4 begins by praising solitude, but then changes: ‘O Solitude! Where are the charms / That sages have seen in thy face? / Better dwell in the midst of alarms / Than reign in this horrible place’. For him, poetry, of which he wrote a lot, was a way of keeping madness at bay and exorcizing it. 2. No student of either has so far pointed out a certain number of analogies between Cowper and Hopkins, beginning with the more or less enforced withdrawal from the world accompanied by an often urgent need to return to it. In his letters, Hopkins mentions Cowper only once, in a rather generic manner: a particular line of verse in Patmore reminds him of Cowper, so, obviously, Hopkins must have read and assimilated the author of The Task. As I have often pointed out, Hopkins had read and studied more writers than he refers to in his correspondence. But, after all, it is by means of a concordance that all of the thematic and lexical similarities can be verified. The most conspicuous analogy is the use of the verbal string: ‘serene-storm-ship at sea-safe haven-shipwreck’. Cowper, a ‘land-lubber’ poet, who, like Hopkins, never set foot on a boat, returns repeatedly and obsessively to the theme of shipwreck and drowning. The lexical-thematic chain is applied memorably to the Reverend. Newton:5 he is on board a ship and sails into a safe harbour, while the trembling poet is tossed by the tempest-driven waves of the open sea. The symbolic and

3

4 5

His marriage to the Reverend Unwin’s widow was called off because a month before the wedding he had another attack of madness. His life at Olney – based on the concept of withdrawal, closing oneself in a protective communion with nature, hiding away and almost burying oneself – is reminiscent of Eichendorff ’s classic dawdler, or the atmosphere of Schubert’s Winterreise. Selkirk is, of course, the original of Robinson Crusoe. ‘To Mr Newton on his Return from Ramsgate’.

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metaphorical experience of shipwreck is central to Cowper’s most famous poem, the dramatic ‘The Castaway’. Read together with the ‘Deutschland’, it reveals the first examples of a number of technical terms mixed with others of romance origin; playing on the use of pronouns, it preannounces the identification of the poet with the castaway desperately trying to stay afloat, ‘supported by despair of life’ (the oxymoron could have been written by Hopkins himself ), and the measured use of hyperbole to describe the fury of the elements. In Cowper’s poem, the agony of the castaway is truly excruciating, shown frame by frame in slow motion right up to where the waters close forever over his head.6 But the castaway is more of a fighter than Cowper ever was, just as Hopkins used to often project himself in heroic figures. The last stanza suggests what Hopkins too discovers in his poem – that the storm is the ‘gift’ of an evil and destructive God. Similar objective correlatives of the ship at sea overtaken by a storm are legion in Cowper’s works. Both he and Hopkins were influenced by the Calvinist ‘misunderstanding’ of an angry, violent deity.7 Both, in particular Cowper, from time to time believed they had been abandoned by God: Cowper’s ‘dark night of the soul’ is the longer, and is the subject of several ‘terrible’ poems that bewail the silence of God and seem to herald His demise in the nineteenth century. Cowper’s ‘The Poplar-Field’ reappears verbatim in ‘Binsey Poplars’, alongside a nature wounded and maimed by man – nature both inanimate and living, including all those animals and birds that express the concept of innocence (we shall see later their demonic antithesis). 3. This tender, whole-hearted love of nature goes back to Herbert, and looks ahead to Wordsworth, who, in turn, leads on to Hopkins. The faint perception of God in nature and his pleasing descriptions of the natural world have made Cowper one of the best loved poets in English. He possesses that indefinable quality of ‘charm’. But he is also the poet of recollection and nostalgia: exasperated by his empty, apparently useless life, he looks back with yearning to days gone by. To help define his art, it is useful to consider the title of his most important poem, The Task: he was ‘forced’ to write, whether as a duty or as part of a therapeutic process; furthermore, his muse was not very demanding, much like that of Trollope 6 7

Death by water, like that of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Phlebas the Phoenician’. For Hopkins, with Keble and Browning, cf. my essay MVO.

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a century later. He was able to dash off lines galore on any subject, turning out poems that are near-perfect and highly polished, but anonymous and shallow. Of this he was aware, and admitted he did not possess ‘prophetic fire’,8 but dealt only in trifles. In short, he was a scribbler. Later, the suspicion arose that, isolated as he was, he was deaf and blind to the great events and instances that were rocking the dying years of the century. Yet he was sufficiently in tune with current affairs to speak out against colonialism and slavery. He received and registered news from all over the world, but without any clamorous, outspoken reaction. A similar desire not to lose contact altogether with the world around him lies at the heart of his voluminous correspondence, so dear to the English reader. 4. Cowper’s Poems, published in 1782, contained a substantial group of lyrics on various subjects and in various styles, plus eight fairly long, indigestible satires in rhymed couplets on a number of abstract questions; also present in the volume were several hymns which, together with others written by the Reverend Newton, had already appeared in 1779 with the title of Olney Hymns. A humorous narrative poem called the History of John Gilpin, about a merchant on holiday with his wife and children in London (a favourite subject for playwrights), was published separately in 1782. ‘The Castaway’ came out in 1799, again by itself. Between the two came The Task and a translation of Homer that was deliberately antithetical to that of Pope, but failed to justify the years of toil that went into it. An idea of the varied nature of Poems is given by the title of the first piece: ‘Verses Written at Bath, on Finding the Heel of a Shoe’. Strangely enough, there is no satirical or humorous intent here, only a diary-like precision in noting date and place of this or that event in the course of an average day. The earliest compositions are a kind of self-analysis under the influence of the love for ‘Delia’ in the light of a prospected separation.9 After this the poems scatter in different directions: animal fables, historical re-enactments, scenes from nature, anecdotes, an open letter to friends and acquaintances, clearly derived from Pope, and, through Pope, from Horace. ‘The Colubriad’ is the first example of a genre of which Cowper became a master: the sudden appearance, in a house, of a viper, which, chased back out into the garden, is 8 9

Cited in PGU, vol. IV, 388. This section was inserted in editions of the poems only in 1825.

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then slain by the poet ‘filled with heroic ardour’. The high point of the gallery of anecdotes featuring various pets is the poem on the hare, which the poet feeds and cares for. The poem is full of affection for this wild pet animal, the poet’s double in its fearfulness and trembling timidity. In another poem, on a halibut he has just eaten, he wonders where it came from: with its insistent questioning, the beginning of the poem might sound like a humorous version of Blake’s ‘The Tiger’. Cowper’s gentleness and spirit of observation are seen in the delightful verses on birds and animals. Some of the hymns are simply parts of religious ritual, and indeed some of them are still used in Anglican services. Others provide moving insights into Cowper’s endless struggle with doubt and despair. Life is always a voyage towards some haven, far from discord and dispute and the tempest’s roar. One thinks of Christina Rossetti and the early Hopkins in his more tranquil mode; but also of Herbert without the wit: ‘Behind a frowning providence, / He hides a smiling face’. The Task (1785), in six books and in blank verse, was occasioned by a slightly indelicate suggestion from one of Cowper’s many aristocratic patronesses, who, on hearing that the poet lacked a subject, proposed he should write something on … the sofa. The Task proceeds from one subject to another, guided by far from stringent associations, many of them more intimate and personal than public.10 After the burlesque opening dedicated to the history of chairs and the invention of the sofa, the poet launches into a memory trip to the places of his infancy and youth, the solitary walks by the Thames, and landscapes recalled in the smallest detail. In the second book, however, he hits out against slavery and the excesses and aberrations of a corrupt world. It reads like an updated version of Pope’s Essay on Man, with similar abundance of sermonizing insufficiently counterbalanced by lively anecdotes or scenes taken directly from nature. Cowper’s theodicy chimes with that of Eliot’s Four Quartets and anticipates its essential concept: not far from the end, a single line sums up the whole meaning of the poem, stating that ‘Thus heav’n-ward all things tend’. 10

A seasonal poem, often focusing on descriptions of winter days and the warmth of the hearth, The Task resembles The Seasons by Thomson. George Eliot, in her essay on the poet Edward Young, tried enthusiastically, but without convincing, to form a parallel with Night Thoughts. George Eliot had great regard for a poet who presents ‘to us the object of his compassion truthfully and lovingly’, also a definition of her own art.

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§ 151. Smart To borrow an expression used by Joseph Roth, Christopher Smart (1722–1771) is one of the many ‘holy drinkers’ – or sinners – to be found in England at the end of the eighteenth century. Above all, he is the third mad, or nearly mad, poet (though Dr Johnson declared him to be of sound mind). It is disconcerting that he should have spent six years in an asylum for ‘excess of religion’, rather than for excessive criticism of established religion, since his own personal creed was somewhat out of step with the dictates of the safe, slow-simmering pottage of belief proposed by the deistically inclined Anglican Church, so far from the mystical, prophetic trance Smart needed. Johnson could but repeat the adjective he applied to Chatterton and Cowper, sighing, ‘My poor friend Smart’. He pitied him, but could not understand how Smart could bring himself to kneel down in the public thoroughfare to pray and sing hymns. Smart was the son of the steward of an estate in Kent. When his father died in 1733 the family moved north to Durham. At the age of fifteen, he matriculated in the University of Cambridge, and immediately acquired a reputation for his brilliance in classics, such that he won several prizes for Latin poetry. He also became well known for his debts and drunkenness. In spite of this, he was made a fellow of the college in 1745. Determined to make the most of his talents, he moved to London and became part of Grub Street, writing articles under various aliases for a number of newspapers and periodicals in exchange for a few miserable pennies. A variegated anthology of poems published in 1752 garnered more criticism than praise, and one particularly hostile reviewer was repaid with a Hilliad, a pseudo-Homeric reference to the name of the critic who had lambasted him. In the meantime, Smart had won, for the fifth consecutive year, the prize awarded by the University of Cambridge for the best composition on the attributes of the Divine Being. The principal, indeed, only, symptom – also considered equivalent to disturbing the peace – that in 1757 led the authorities to order his internment in an asylum was a compulsive urge to pray outside the canonical places of worship. Smart was treated well in the mental hospital, and the legend has been laid to rest that he composed A Song to David1 (1763) by writing 1

Not included in the first collected edition.

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the verses on the walls of his cell using a piece of charcoal, or using a key to inscribe them on the wooden shutters of the windows. During his time in the asylum, his wife, the daughter of the publisher, Newbury (and a Catholic, as were their two daughters) left him. After his release, Smart continued to write without stint, until he was arrested for debt and imprisoned. He died in the King’s Bench prison on May 20, 1771. 2. Smart was unique, and it is no exaggeration to say that he left at least two works of unparalleled value. Dr Johnson who, as we have seen, was well-disposed towards him, omitted him from his Lives, and the reading public of the latter part of the eighteenth century had no choice but to ignore or belittle him. He is the opposite of sweet, flowing Cowper: he is twisted, densely packed, never ‘pleasing’. The two were exact contemporaries, and used the same poetic genres, at least in the case of the hymn (Smart wrote several of his own and translated a collection of Psalms from the Bible), but never were two poets further apart. It was Browning who rehabilitated him, dedicating to him one of his ‘conversations’ in his last long work, Parleyings,2 stating, as a critic, that Smart was the first to break through the diaphragm between res and verba and inventing a new, more immediate, poetic language. Rossetti followed up with an equally highsounding tribute, though neither he nor Browning had access to the second of Smart’s masterpieces, which was discovered and published only in late twentieth century and is, in part, responsible for the upsurge of interest in him on the part of both critics and general public.3 Right from the early poems, Smart comes across as a poet who likes rhythm, emphasis, alliteration, anaphora and the hymnodic style. His poetry essentially urges the reader to transform his life into a long, uninterrupted sanctification and adoration of God. His rhetorical code is based on tropes connected with ‘pathos’ rather than ‘ethos’, and on a vocabulary that is never conventional (there is an abundance of hapax terms). Like Smart, Hopkins, too, believed in the equation of poetry with the enunciation of the divine presence in creation. The beginning of ‘God’s Grandeur’, for example, echoes Smart’s ‘the universe is full of God’s works’. In his hymn for his re-found health, in 2 3

Volume 6, § 23.3. A meticulous modern version is Poetical Works, ed. K. Williamson and M. Walsh, 6 vols, Oxford 1980–1996.

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1756, he says the aim of poetry is ‘to love, praise, bless, surprise and adore’.4 In A Song to David the whole of nature, flora and fauna, adores the Creator by means of the words of the Davidic poet, and the poet takes pleasure in the art of pure and joyous enumeration of rare species of flowers, animals and birds, spices and minerals, gradually compiling a rising Lobgesang that culminates triumphantly with all of thirteen anaphoric repetitions of the term ‘glorious’.5 During his time in the asylum, most propitious for his art, Smart also pieced together fragments of Jubilate Agno (published in 1939 in one of the very great literary salvage operations ever, it is believed to be only the surviving half of Smart’s entire manuscript). It parallels and complements the Song in contents and intent, but is yet more revolutionary in its form, with its Whitmanesque free prosody, pounding rhythms and antiphonal chant, so that the sense goes round and round, on and on, like some interminable lament. § 152. Crabbe* Given the year of his birth, and the fact that his first works appeared at the same time as those of Cowper and Smart, George Crabbe (1754–1832) rightly belongs to the age of Johnson. However, he fell silent for twenty 4 5 *

It is no coincidence that the biography, Poor Kit Smart, London 1961, is the work of the greatest expert on Hopkins’s sermons, Christopher Devlin. Note in the title the adjective always used to describe Smart. In 1943, following up a suggestion by Auden, Britten set a number of pieces from Jubilate Agno. Complete Poetical Works, ed. N. Dalrymple-Champneys and A. Pollard, Oxford 1988. Selected Letters and Journalism, ed. T. C. Faulkner, Oxford 1985. G. Crabbe, Jr, The Life of the Rev. George Crabbe, LLB, London 1834, repr. London 1932 and 1947; R. L. Huchon, George Crabbe and His Times, Eng. trans., London 1907, 1968; E. M. Forster, ‘George Crabbe and Peter Grimes’, in Two Cheers for Democracy, Harmondsworth 1970, 176–92 (essay originally published in 1948); L. Haddakin, The Poetry of Crabbe, London 1955; R. L. Chamberlain, George Crabbe, New York 1965; O. F. Sigworth, Nature’s Sternest Painter: Five Essays on the Poetry of George Crabbe, Tucson, AZ 1965; CRHE, ed. A. Pollard, London 1972, 1995; P. New, George Crabbe’s Poetry, London 1976; T. Bareham, George Crabbe, London 1977; F. Whitehead, George Crabbe: A Reappraisal, Selingsgrove, PA 1995; N. Powell, George Crabbe: An English Life, 1754–1832, London 2004.

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years and reappeared on the literary scene surrounded by Romantics, dying at the beginning of the Victorian period, in the year of the First Reform Bill. So he straddles the centuries, with one foot in the eighteenth and the other in the nineteenth, teetering on the verge, not of madness, but of two, if not three, literary periods. Historians do not divide his work into ‘before and up to 1783’ and ‘post 1807’, or into two or three phases of literary development, since there is in fact no great hiatus or evolution of form or contents, but rather a situation of continuity. In reality, Crabbe is full of unresolved contradictions: he acknowledges and accepts Pope’s neoclassicism, and is loyal to the heroic couplet usque ad mortem, so much so that he was called ‘Pope in worsted stockings’. At the same time, he resembles Wordsworth in his concern for the poor and dispossessed; he is a fierce adversary of the pastoral and sentimental genres, and, indeed of Romanticism in general, yet he opens the way to the novel in prose, with its rules and formal conventions, and to realistic narrative (like Hardy, he sees no escape from or defence against inexorable fate). If the greatness of a poet is measured by the wake he leaves as he passes, then Crabbe can be said to have some claim to greatness: he was admired by later writers of the calibre of Dickens, the George Eliot of Scenes of Clerical Life, Patmore, and, especially, Trollope. They all acknowledged how much they learned from him. Not enough has been made of the fact that, in his emphasis on the tragic/humorous cases of men and women caught up in the humdrum life of a small outlying community, with its landmarks and local laws, its eccentrics and unsung heroes, Crabbe practically gives birth to a kind of narrative that will prove to be very popular with the Victorians. This is the saga of the provincial community, oscillating between realism and fancy, as practised by Gaskell, Trollope, Oliphant and George Eliot herself. In some cases Crabbe goes further, preannouncing the existentialist novel and the theatre of the absurd. So, from the very start, he is ‘metaliterary’, because in almost every work he associates a prosodic signifier with a subject matter that would seem to be better suited to prose. He was well aware of this conflict, and did try to write proper novels, but ended up by burning them. Not many critics or readers have suspected a parodic or selfparodic intention behind his terse, deadpan style; in fact, most accuse him of being too prosaic and flat. Now that we have looked beyond him, let us see who stands behind, who preceded him as a verse narrator of similar

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proportions, using systematically a similar formula. There can be only one answer: Chaucer. Crabbe realized that he could not go on adding tale to tale ad infinitum: he had, like Chaucer, to place them in a framework or invent some reason for aggregation. 2. Crabbe, too, was ‘poor Crabbe’, and for much the same reason as Chatterton, Cowper and Smart. E. M. Forster added that he ought to be studied as a pathological case, and traced all his symptoms back to a lovehate relationship with Aldeburgh, where he was born (compare Leopardi and Recanati, at round about the same time), convinced that many of his protagonists, in particular Peter Grimes, represent the poet himself, and bear witness to, and one might add, exorcise, ‘certain psychological tensions’.1 Crabbe’s native village was the obscure, little-known group of houses on the Suffolk coast, a place of dunes and marshes, not far from where the river Alde meets the sea. In short, he was a ‘son of the estuary’.2 His father was a tax collector for salt duties, but when he was younger had been a schoolmaster with a great love of poetry, which he handed down to his son, who, after a lukewarm attempt at a career as a doctor, then as a chemist, moved to London with a bag full of poems. He showed them to Burke, previously contacted by letter. Although the poems he saw were highly critical of the authorities, Burke understood at once that the author was no revolutionary. The Gordon Riots, the American Revolution and the stirrings of unrest in France all frightened him. Burke saved Crabbe from a life of want in Grub Street by suggesting he enter the Church. He did so, and returned to his native village as a curate. Further promotion brought economic security. After the death of his wife, Sarah, idealized in his early poems under the name of Mira, he twice proposed to two ladies of the parish, but never did marry again. After 1807, he often visited London, and was a friend of Rogers, Campbell and Moore. He went to see his great admirer, Walter Scott, in Edinburgh in 1822. After his death he was forgotten by the wider public, but still revered by fellow poets. His collected works appeared for the first time in 1834; selections were later published by FitzGerald, the author of the Rubáiyát. Crabbe was much

1 2

Connected, above all, with the figure of his father (Forster 1970, 188). Forster 1970, 182.

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appreciated on the other side of the Atlantic by writers like Robinson and Lee Masters, and Ezra Pound, ever the eccentric, called him more modern than many other so-called ‘moderns’. Perhaps because of this strange judgement, Crabbe became popular in the second half of the twentieth century, though he remained something of a niche figure, mainly because of the sheer volume of his poems. Today, only one of them is remembered by the average educated public, thanks to the operatic version by Benjamin Britten. I am referring, obviously, to Peter Grimes. 3. A first example of friction between signifier and signified is provided by a group of poems, composed through the years, on abstract subjects like drunkenness (Inebriety) or adulation. Crabbe’s first official poem, The Library (1781), deals with the various fields of knowledge, using subdivisions and categories drawn from taxonomy, chemistry and pharmacology, presented by means of an imagined visit to a library, where a scholar stops in front of various shelves and takes books out to examine their contents. The Village (1783), revised by Burke and Johnson, is the metaliterary outcome of a falling-out with Goldsmith and an attack on two genres, the pastoral and the sentimental, which falsified the sufferings of the country-dweller, who was presented as living in some kind of idyllic Arcadia of the age of gold. The radical, even prophetically communist contents of this protest poem would seem to be more suited to a pamphlet than to verse, with its denunciation of the unequal distribution of the fruits of the peasants’ toil: ‘and yet not share the plenty they bestow’. Crabbe repeatedly appeals to deaf ears: two key icons of social indifference are the doctor of the poorhouse and the priest who can hardly be bothered to celebrate the funeral rites. In The Newspaper (1785), with an acerbity worthy of Pope, if not of Swift, Crabbe invited his fellow poets to desist, or, at least, to realize that there was no money in poetry. After this, he was silent for twenty years. When he re-appeared on the scene it was as an unstoppable purveyor of anecdotes and stories, drawn from a repertoire he had been memorizing for years. They show Crabbe as a close observer of detail inserted into stories that are nearly always tragic, though their potential is often compromised by a weak, specious context. Earlier, Crabbe’s gaze had been wide-ranging and panoramic; now he concentrates on a handful of individuals and their stories. The Parish Register (1807) presents a curate leafing through the parish register of baptisms, marriages and deaths, and remembering the

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lives of some of the parishioners featured in the records. The Parish Register has an appendix containing a number of ‘opium poems’, believed to have been written under the influence of that drug, which Crabbe took to treat an intestinal disorder. Naturally, one thinks of Coleridge and De Quincey. In the dramatic monologue of Sir Eustace Grey can be seen yet another metaliterary debate: as in Coleridge’s ‘Rime’, the protagonist’s madness is the fruit of a crime and the ensuing punishment.3 The Borough (1810), consisting of twenty-four letters to an acquaintance, is enclosed in a wrapping of essays and other documents that smack of the archives. The institutions of the ‘town’ – both a real and an imaginary place, as it was for the Victorians – are passed in review, often accompanied by some relevant anecdote. One of the letters is about religious sects, another about elections, others deal with the workhouse and its inmates. Letter number twentytwo tells the story of Peter Grimes; this tale of one of the ‘poor people of the town’ towers over all the others. Forster was right when he called it a ‘sombre masterpiece’,4 on a recurring theme in Crabbe, that of a crime or sin committed long before, its memory if not forgotten, at least metabolized, that returns to torment and damn the perpetrator in the form of relentless regret and remorse. In 1945 Montagu Slater used Crabbe’s text to write his superb libretto for Britten’s opera (Britten was born a few miles north of Aldeburgh). Slater’s libretto introduces a number of new elements to the original text, with a mixture of situations and characters from other poems by Crabbe. The story tells of strange, surreal happenings in a fishing village, amongst whose inhabitants is the misanthropist, Grimes, who unleashes mysterious demonic, destructive forces. First, he is witness to (or the cause of ) the death of one cabin boy, then another, then a third.5 Britten

3 4 5

Cf. GSM, 252. Forster 1970, 180, recounts the genesis of the episode that took place in Aldeburgh, involving a certain Tom Brown, whose name was changed into Peter Grimes. Slater’s version is, however, too bulky and complicated for an opera, which requires a simple, straightforward story. Peter Grimes is existentialist, unorthodox and overly daring for the genre; it also contains touches of the ‘absurd’, anticipating, in certain aspects, the works of Pinter and Bond. Grimes’s hoarse, desperate rants conjure up both King Lear and Pinter’s Davis.

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recognized in the tale Crabbe’s most brilliant study of mental instability, irresponsibility and demonic possession. The famous ‘sea interludes’ convey the sense of the mystery and magic of the deep, while in the finale of the opera he catches the madness, aboulia and suffering to which Grimes finally succumbs. In Tales in Verse (1812) Crabbe’s flair for story-telling comes to the fore with twenty-one short ‘novels’ built on tragic, pathetic or ambiguous situations – the kind of thing that will re-surface in Victorian short stories (one of them gave Tennyson the idea for ‘Enoch Arden’). In Tales of the Hall (1819), based on the uninspired structure of two brothers who meet after many years, and tell each other the story of their lives, Crabbe’s imagination, far from being finished, seems to find new strength. Along with a number of posthumous poems, the two collections mentioned above constitute almost two thirds of Crabbe’s poetic output. § 153. Wesley and Methodism As religious belief and practice became mere routine and the established Church lost touch with the spiritual needs of its flock, an alternative expression of fervour whose hotbed was Oxford. The ‘explosion’ of Methodism was preceded by the community of Little Gidding, and followed, a century later, by the Oxford or Tractarian Movement, which was, however, destined to remain an elite phenomenon, and, as such, quite limited in range. Methodism, founded in Oxford by John (1703–1791) and Charles (1707–1788) Wesley, was a form of re-born Puritanism without the political Radicalism. Its sole aim was to bring back to the faith and to religious practice the masses of ‘lost’ farmworkers and, especially, coal-miners and factory workers, crushed in the cogs of the Industrial Revolution and left to their own devices. Uppermost in the minds of the founders was the importance of prayer and the conversion of minds and hearts; theological controversies were a secondary concern. For this reason, Wesley presented himself as part of the Anglican Church, rather than the founder of a separatist movement. This worked as long as the movement was only a small university cell, whose members celebrated communion every week, and prayed and fasted together. However, when Wesley began his incredibly popular activity as an itinerant preacher – it was to last fifty years – problems of organization and hierarchy arose; when the first Methodist ministers were ordained, the Anglican Church distanced itself from the movement.

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Wesley’s brother, Charles, gradually developed ideas not exactly in line with John’s, and the third co-founder, George Whitefield (1714–1770), broke away and formed a splinter group of so-called Calvinistic Methodists. Strictly speaking, the most literarily gifted of the three was Charles, who wrote more than 6,000 hymns, many of them considered the finest in the English language. John Wesley translated hymns from German, and wrote a much admired Journal (the first part of which was published in 1739), full of humour and common sense, along with a few, very English, ‘hobbyhorses’. Methodism has been credited with a significant role in forestalling the outbreak of an ‘English Revolution’ along the lines of the French by preaching the Kingdom of Heaven to the masses. The movement itself was conservative and anti-revolutionary; it abhorred Radicalism. § 154. The Scottish awakening The presentation, in one block as here, of more than fifty years of eighteenth-century Scottish literature is possible in the light of the birth and development of a coordinated movement of like spirits, united in aims and ideals, and intent on revitalizing the cultural scene, from a social point of view (the formation of literary circles, libraries, journals, publishing houses with a resulting increase in the number of books printed, itself a cause and effect of the spread of literacy and an expansion of the reading public). In the course of this revival, Scottish history, myth and tradition were rediscovered and revaluated, and the search was on for worthy exponents in the fields of prose, poetry and the drama.1 The consistence and results of the ‘awakening’ should be measured against the fact that 200 years before, Scotland had become the centre of literary activity in English (in reality, Anglo-Scots), with the first of the ‘golden ages’ – Dunbar, Henryson, Douglas, Lyndsay, the Scottish Chaucerians. This primacy rapidly faded, and the unity of Scottish writers crumbled and died. As soon as they were aware of their literary vocation, all the new authors emigrated to London, and fell to composing in pure English, taking care to hide all traces of their linguistic origin. Clearly, for them the cultivation of the old Scottish traditions led

1

Ireland was to tread the same path a century later; until the middle of the nineteenth century, Irish writers were isolated and disorganized.

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nowhere.2 Boswell, Smollett and Burns did not, as far as we know, know one another, and therefore worked quite independently. None of the three insist on their national identity, although their Scottishness cannot be totally smothered. Modern historians, especially Scots like Grierson and Daiches – unlike their English counterparts – dwelt at length, for obvious reasons, on the ‘second golden age’ in Scotland that begins at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Yet they all agree, so as not to appear too nationalistic, that the revival culminated with Burns, and that, after all, it was nothing but a short-lived blaze of glory, the results of which were essentially quite modest. They add that there was to be 200 years of drought before a third golden age dawned and spawned the matchless Hugh MacDiarmid.3 2. As a literary language, Scots, with its dozens of dialects, all but disappeared with the advance of English expansionism, aided by the passiveness of the local intelligentsia, until, in 1707, with the Act of Union, Scotland formerly became nothing more than the northern province of the new kingdom. Scottish literary life had for years been languishing owing to the lack of a court round which writers might gather. In reality, it was precisely England’s annexation of Scotland that fired Scottish national pride. Cultural re-birth entails discovering roots, and Scotland possessed an immense literary heritage just waiting to be unearthed. A year before the Union, James Watson, an Edinburgh publisher, produced the first of three volumes of ancient and modern Scottish poetry, both comic and serious, an overflowing treasure chest stuffed full of delights and documents that were bound to 2

3

The philosopher, Hume, was one of those Scots that had his work ‘corrected’ by English writers to cleanse it of all Scottish elements. Also uninterested in Scottish traditions was the poet, James Beattie (1735–1803), who, as professor of philosophy at Aberdeen, was an adversary of Hume’s. As a critic, Beattie even came up with a pamphlet in which he listed the Scotticisms to be avoided by all who wished to write the ‘King’s English’. As an example, he wrote The Minstrel (1771–1774), in two books and more than 100 imitation Spenserian stanzas – an anticipation of the Prelude, at least in certain very Romantic passages on the spiritual and poetic Bildung of the protagonist, in a series of Scottish landscapes clearly inspired by Burke’s sublime: ‘In darkness and in storm he found delight’. The theme of formation is decked out in medieval trappings. Volume 8, § 98.3.

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whet the curiosity of readers and writers. As was to be expected, there followed a flood of contemporary imitations of ancient ballads and humorous epistolary duels in epigrammatic form. The infiltration of the Scots koinè was, inevitably, limited to poetry in its various genres and registers, especially comic compositions involving mangled English or Scots terms, or a mixture of the two. It might, and did, appear in the dialogue in novels by Scott or Galt, but could not very well be used in non-fiction or other kinds of prose. In 1724 a second milestone was laid with the publication of two analogous collections, of dubious philological value, by Allan Ramsay (1686–1758). At first a wig-maker in Edinburgh, Ramsay subsequently became a bookseller, a patron of the arts, the founder of a literary club (the Easy Club), and an all-round benefactor in the literary life of the city. He was also a poet in his own right, much criticized by his fellow Scots for his superficiality and lack of continuity. He was credited, however, with a certain degree of spontaneity and authenticity, almost always, though not quite always – that would be too easy – when he speaks of everyday things, or echoes the poetry of the wind-battered Highlands. It is when he becomes all formal and ‘English’ that he fails as a poet. His pastoral play, The Gentle Shepherd (1725), might at first not quite ring true, but, as it proceeds, it begins to throb with life, managing to combine formal classicism with the rhythms, cadences and vocabulary of everyday speech, thus introducing a welcome element of rural realism. In this greater, though never total, verisimilitude, together with the implicit criticism of a no longer fashionable genre of writing, Ramsay has sometimes been compared to Crabbe, since, like the Aldeburgh bard, he is not prepared to endorse the idealized world of Arcadian pastoral and continue to purvey its worn-out modules. Daiches quite correctly4 makes a list of irreconcilable conflicts in Ramsay that reflect corresponding tensions within the Scottish culture of the time, among which appreciation of blatantly antithetical poets and support for a ‘sentimental’, yet instrumental Jacobitism, based on no serious political analysis. 3. After Ramsay, towards the middle of the century, more and more collections of ancient Scots poetry appeared in the wake of Percy and

4

DAI, vol. II, 813.

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Macpherson. Ramsay had a more scrupulous follower in David Herd, whose anthologies appeared in 1769 and 1776. As a poet, Ramsay was excelled by Robert Fergusson (1750–1774), who died at the age of twenty-four in a mental hospital, a Scottish Smart (with similar linguistic potency) or Chatterton (with whom he shared a gift for pranks). Had he lived, Fergusson would probably have changed the course of Scottish poetry; as it was, he showed the way to Burns with his urban epistles and ballads full of local colour and details of the townscape conveyed with the help of skilfully varied metrical formulas. By the end of the century, the glory of the Scottish revival was all but spent, with the exception of Burns, and even he moved more towards the tradition of music-hall than to Parnassus. To crown it all, in 1802 Jeffrey’s Edinburgh Review proceeded to anglicize Scottish culture. So much for promises.  § 155. Hogg James Hogg (1770–1835) is one of those eccentric, unique characters who have produced at least one outstanding work, and who has often ended up by being penalized and confined to a slot in an overview of Scottish literature of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This idiosyncratic, provocative writer deserves, I think, a more subjective treatment. His life, as recounted by himself in four revised editions, bears the familiar marks of many self-taught geniuses, the amazing feats of determination and resolution, volumes read and written by the light of the midnight oil, the struggle against all the odds. Born in Ettrick in the very heart of the Scottish Lowlands – hence the soubriquet, ‘the Ettrick shepherd’– he liked to repeat that he was semi-illiterate up to the age of fifteen, able only to write the letters of the alphabet, and that the only book he had access to was the Bible. He had, however, learned and loved the Scottish ballads his mother used to sing to him. He continued his work as a shepherd and cowherd while the seed of poetry came to fruition within him. After hearing Burns recite his poems, he was struck by poetic fire, and at twenty-three he published his first poem in a magazine, followed in 1801 by a whole volume of verses. He was encouraged by Scott and collaborated with him in the preparation of The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802). The last twenty-five years of his life were a helter-skelter succession of initiatives: he was involved

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in several unsuccessful attempts to procure a farm of his own, with the result that he found himself deeply in debt. In 1815 he was granted a small holding where he could live rent free for the rest of his life. For some time he edited an Edinburgh newspaper almost singlehandedly, and, above all, published a rapid series of collections of poems, epics, satires, stories in prose and novels featuring Scottish life. His penultimate book contained anecdotes on the life of Scott. Hogg was an ambitious poet, proud of his uniqueness, and convinced of his worth, which he thought was not inferior to that of Scott, whom he acknowledged to be the ‘king of knightly poetry’ while he himself was, he said, the greatest poet of ‘faerie’. His fame crossed the Border, and, when he died, Wordsworth wrote his now famous ‘Extempore Effusion’. Posterity, however, even in Scotland, did not treat him so kindly, and indeed, even before his death, he had been gently mocked by the critic John Wilson, alias Christopher North, in Noctes Ambrosianae, a series of imaginary conversations that appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine. His poetry has gradually become hard to find and is absent from even the most recent anthologies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scottish verse. His shortcomings are the transcription into pure English of Scots material and what comes across as an insincere and sentimental version of Jacobitism.1 ‘Bonnie Kilmeny’ (one of the seventeen poems in The Queen’s Wake,2 published in 1813) expresses a need for transcendence and ecstasy, similar to the cry that issues from the work of Hopkins and of Christina Rossetti on the nuns that yearn for the spiritual life, as well as in the ‘blessed damozel’ of her brother, Dante Gabriel. Several of his other visionary poems and ballads still have some appeal, with their strong, syncopated rhythms. 2. The critics of Hogg’s day either ignored or dealt summarily with The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), and several modern historians, too, usually attentive and exhaustive, adept at listing the names of even the most minor authors, have omitted to mention this particular work by Hogg. It is a huge oversight, considering the literary value of this forward-looking work compared with his poetry. The position

1 2

Mere posing, according to GSM, 395. The queen in question is Mary Stuart.

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of critics today is exactly the opposite:3 the Private Memoirs is seen as an inexplicable excellence of a mediocre poet, so much so that some have suspected some more experienced writer, like Lockhart,4 may have had a hand in it. The Memoirs constitute a milestone in the development of postFaustism, doppelganger literature and that of the curse of Calvinism, the magnetism of which reaches down through George Eliot, Emily Brontë, Browning, Conrad, to Stevenson, and even as far as Muriel Spark. There are links with both Silas Marner and Adam Bede in the ambiguous presentation of Methodism.5 The opening of the novel, with the foul-mouthed George Colman Sr and his pious wife, who refuses to bow to him, will be echoed by Stevenson in Weir of Hermiston; the hatred between the two brothers reminds us of The Master of Ballantrae; but, above all, the split psyche of the protagonist of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is anticipated in the situation of Hogg’s main character, Robert Wringhim. Prophetic signs of Emily Brontë and Browning are evident in the plot structure built round the incredible, aimed at presenting the problem of the relativity of truth6 (after all, only twenty-five years separate Hogg’s Justified Sinner from Wuthering Heights, and another twenty-five from The Ring and the Book). In 1820, Maturin had already experimented a different, complicated, acrobatic structure, compared to which Hogg’s novel stands out as a spare, essential description of the inexorability of fate.7 3. The first reviewers of Justified Sinner interpreted the formal sophistication as ‘awkwardness’, while today it is seen as a distant clarion of the postmodern, which might, perhaps, be mistaken for some unknown work by John Fowles. The three internal time frames – 1687, 1712 and 1823 – are

3 4 5 6 7

The growing interest is proved by a modern edition in course of printing, in several volumes, of Hogg’s works, edited by D. S. Mack, Edinburgh 1995–. BAUGH, vol. IV, 1274. Volume 5, §§ 187 and 194. Hogg goes beyond Browning because he does not close the openness, nor solve the enigmas of reality by means of an authoritarian voice super partes, as Browning does with the monologue of the Pope in The Ring and the Book (Volume 4, § 132). The precedent has been noted, in the background, of Hoffmann’s Die Elixiere des Teufels (1815).

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characterized by three different styles. In the first part, the narrating voice is that of the equidistant, unengaged observer who is familiar with the stratagem of anti-climax so typical of an eighteenth-century narrator. The bitter theological controversies that obsess the various characters are treated with contempt, as if they were the over-the-fence bickering of warring neighbours. After the death of George Colwan, one of the two half-brothers, the novel becomes an investigation, in fact, a real crime novel, complete with a trial scene, in which a maidservant, called to give evidence, comes out with a colourful account of events in broad Scots. The second part is a memoir couched in unmistakeably Browninguesque terms: the narrating voice passes from the third to the first person, and the same events, objectified in the first person, are ‘shot’ (as in a film by, say, Kurosawa) a second time, from a different standpoint, more subjective and less impartial, that of the second brother, Robert. The text, thus ‘binomial’ and ‘echoed’, is reduced in the end to a further textual unit, and becomes a case of Verfremdungseffekt. It is a diary kept by Robert Wringhim, which, as in epistolary novels, provides a series of updates of the story, and uses the present tense, followed immediately by the word of the last narrator, who is, in effect, the one who gathers and organizes all the material. This narrator, however, employs a second-hand document, which relates the exhuming of a suicide’s body in 1823, the year, that is, of the enunciation. The postmodern ingenuity of this final part lies in the fact that the letter of the person who has opened the grave is signed ‘James Hogg’, and is reproduced and judged on the last page of the novel by the anonymous narrator. Hogg’s self-irony here is quite sophisticated: Hogg, it is implied, is not new to this kind of nonsense, and now enters as a livestock farmer who has brought his sheep and cows to market and is attempting to sell them, obviously in broad Scots. The last pages are to be understood, like the first, as enunciation, because, in the grave, along with personal items and minutely described clothing, the manuscript of Robert Wringhim’s confessions is found. They end up in the hands of the publisher of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. 4. True to the well-known principle mater semper certa it is never ascertained, with any degree of certainty, whether George Colwan Jr and Robert Wringhim are indeed half-brothers: Colwan, the Laird, refuses to recognize Robert, and the unctuous Reverend Wringhim might well

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be a lecher in disguise (strangely enough, Robert is given the surname of Wringhim, without anyone objecting, and considers and calls the reverend his putative father.)8 The two boys are brought up with diametrically opposite methods of education, and are kept well apart, but, fatally, their paths cross, and, after series of scuffles and fist-fights in the streets of Edinburgh, George is killed in a duel, we do not know exactly by whom – whether by a friend he came to blows with or by his half-brother. The friend is found guilty of the murder and banished. George’s father dies of sorrow, and Robert inherits the family fortune. In the second perspective of the confessions, related by Robert in the first person, great emphasis is placed, ex post, on the Calvinist minister’s undue influence over Robert himself. One day, Wringhim tells Robert that he is beyond doubt one of the elect, predestined, that is, to be saved. Immediately after, he meets his satanic double. On his return, his mother suspects this is the case (‘I generally conceived myself to be two people’). In this Faustian context, the mild-mannered Blanchard, whose very name contains the idea of innocence, is the good angel who tries to save Robert from Satan’s sway, but he is killed in an ambush in God’s name, during which Mephistopheles fires, too, in the person of his alter ego, Gil-Martin. The bullet goes wide, and it is up to Robert to finish him off. The paradox that takes shape in the mind of the predestined character is this: why take so much trouble to save someone who is destined to perdition? It is better to collaborate with God, destroy those that are already damned, and save those who can be saved. Robert’s aim is that of Macbeth: both believe they are instruments of God, and try to take his place. In the repetition of the dazzling scene on the hill, a woman dressed in white puts Robert to flight when she emerges from the mist. Robert is about to give up when the diabolic tempter pushes him once again towards his brother with a view to sending him hurtling off the cliff. The diabolical alter ego transforms the woman in white into a young girl who has urged him to murder rather than dissuade him from it. She then removes all doubt in Robert by telling him that an early death will prevent other crimes being committed by

8

The name Wringhim is clearly semantically charged, like the names of many of Dickens’s characters.

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George. In the duel, re-told from Robert’s point of view, George is invited to desist in his attempts to kill ‘the Lord’s anointed’, and, when he steps forward, is killed. This version of events is said to be objective, and therefore true, but it is only a testimony purported to be true, given by the diabolical Gil-Martin. Robert does not kill his father, since the latter dies of natural causes before he can be killed. When, on the run, Robert finds work with a printer, he conceives the idea of writing the confessions, which are then published. This is what lies behind the second part of Hogg’s book. In the diary proper, Robert is dogged by his persecutor, but it is he, rather than the other, to be mistaken for the devil and chased out of town. His end is reminiscent of the death of Marlowe’s Faustus: he feels death approaching, death which will be, so it seems, a double suicide, his and his alter egos’. § 156. Mackenzie Henry Mackenzie (1745–1831) – an Edinburgh lawyer and high-ranking civil-servant who, when young, had been something of an author – is generally seen as having little or nothing to do with the ‘Scottish awakening’. A glance at his main literary endeavours – three novels and four plays – clearly shows his intention to stay at a safe distance from that soil and those roots, and to give his work a more neutral flavour – off-centre, cosmopolitan, less immersed in ‘Scottishness’. Indeed he succeeded in creating a literary identity for himself as a professional writer, using standard, classical, English with little or no regional markings, perfectly integrated in his social group. So different to Hogg, clearly. Mackenzie shone in the study of the classics at university, but had no interest in poetry. Nevertheless, he started up two journals that contributed to raising the level of literary debate in Scotland. As a critic, he made early assessments of Burns and Byron, besides penetrating interpretations of Shakespeare. He encouraged up-and-coming Scottish writers, and was called by Scott the Addison of Scotland because of a certain resemblance between The Man of Feeling (1771) and Addison’s series of essays featuring Sir Roger de Coverley. The Man of Feeling, Mackenzie’s most famous, though not his best novel, became proverbial thanks to the main character, a gentle, ingenuous soul moved to compassion by other people’s misfortunes, always expected to turn the other cheek and be charitable even towards those who take advantage of

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him. The title points to a human type and code of behaviour as a silent antidote to the rapine and avarice prevailing in the world at large. Shy to a fault, Harley falls in love with an heiress without showing it and declares his love only on his death bed. The prototype of the character is found in Addison, and especially in Goldsmith, with the all too perfect Primrose, and in Sterne’s Yorick. In the general background we find the philosophy of Rousseau and Shaftesbury, of benevolence and spontaneous feeling, as well as Burke and his sublime, and the subtle pleasure aroused by other people’s pain seen from a certain distance. Looking ahead from The Man of Feeling, we discern Mr Pickwick. Mackenzie’s Scottishness can be seen above all in the form. The novel is quite short: it is supposed to be a manuscript that a curate given to hunting has used as wadding for his gun, and then handed, fragmentary and mutilated as it is, to the editor who tells the story. Hence the presence of some Sternian ploys, like the beginning of chapter eleven, the omission of several chapters, and lines of asterisks to indicate further missing text. His other two novels are more traditional in their format, and the contrast between good, simple souls and those who are out to exploit them emerges more clearly. The Man of the World (1773) has a farraginous, theatrical plot, involving far-fetched discoveries of identities and the well-deserved punishment of the villain, aptly named Sindall. The epistolary novel, Julia de Roubigné (1777), seems to be inspired by Richardson’s Clarissa: a young woman, given in marriage to a man she does not love, is killed by her jealous husband when her former suitor – another ‘sentimental man’ – returns to England after attempting to carry out voluntary work, including campaigning against slavery, in Martinique. Edgeworth and Scott saw in this novel the theme of the fall and disappearance of an ancient family and the rise of the middle class.

Part V 

Romanticism

§ 157. From the Napoleonic wars to the Age of Equipoise My title indicates an a quo and ad quem chronology that could not be clearer and more unequivocal: we are dealing with a period of forty years, divided into two parts, the first going from the French Revolution up to the Congress of Vienna in 1815, and the second covering 1815 to 1832, generally accepted as marking the beginning of the Victorian Age, five years earlier than Victoria’s actual accession to the throne, but significant in that it is the year of the First Reform Bill. Everyone agrees on the dates of beginning and end of a period in which so many events of capital importance happened, and at a speed that had never been seen before. To start with, the end of the eighteenth century presented a situation in Britain that was not exactly rare, but, let us say, infrequent, of a ‘mad’ king. As is well known, George III’s condition was revealed when, in 1787, he addressed an oak tree as the King of Prussia (the metabolic disorder he suffered from at intervals is called porphyria); he was deprived of power and transferred to Windsor, where he spent his time playing Handel on the harmonium. In 1810 he was declared incapable and his son, George, nominated Prince Regent, hence the name, ‘Regency’, given to the period that followed, a brief, swirling belle époque with its own particular social aspects, manners and cultural characteristics.1 In 1820 the Regent became king with the title of George IV. British politics were dominated for more than twenty years by Pitt the Younger, who, at twenty-two years of age, became chancellor under Shelburne, and at the end of the Fox ministry in 1784 became, at the age of twenty-four, the youngest British Prime Minister of all time. He kept the position until he died, with the exception a three-year interval 1

The lover of the future king until she was paid off with a generous settlement, Mary Robinson (1758–1800) was a pupil of Hannah More (§ 221.1), acted for a while with Sheridan, and was the subject of scandal on account of various love affairs. Painted by Reynolds and Gainsborough, in 1775 she published her first poems, which were much admired by Coleridge. She wrote Petrarchan sonnets on the story of Sappho and Phaon (1796), which, together with those of Charlotte Smith (§ 168.3) marked the revival of this form. A number of outspoken odes against Pitt and current repressive sexual mores were published posthumously by her daughter, and the radical campaigns and instances of the closing years of the century reverberated in her many Gothic and sentimental novels.

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between 1801 and 1804.2 In domestic politics, Pitt re-organized finances, supported free trade in order to boost the economy after the loss of the American colonies, and further strengthened the East India Company. The overall health of the economy was expressed in the increase in population in the northern towns (as a result of a lower mortality rate), a widespread system of canals, an increase in the number of ports equipped to make the most of the greater speed of national and international trade. Productivity rose, at the cost, however, of de-humanizing work rhythms in factories and mines, where women and very young children were employed as well. The average annual wage of workers was a ridiculously low eleven pounds. The countryside and towns were blighted by factories and the sky blackened by the smoke of belching chimneys, a sight we are used to but which then aroused apocalyptic fears. When the government banned demonstrations, workers’ anger reached explosion point: in 1811 and 1816, so-called Luddites (named after a certain Ned Ludd) decided to destroy factory machinery. Poverty increased among farm-workers too, and the possibility was discussed by reformers and radical thinkers of abolishing the Corn Laws, which would have hit landowners, but not too much, while bringing relief to the poor. Followers of Paine’s Radicalism and the early form of socialism of Spence and Owen demanded, furthermore, the abolition of the monarchy, landed property and capitalism, with the support of the parliamentary reform movement led by Cobbett. The progressive intellectuals of the Clapham Sect put their weight behind causes like the abolition of the slave trade and the repatriation of freed slaves to Africa.3 2

3

At first, Pitt headed a minority government, but he won a landslide victory in the 1784 election. He resigned in 1801 because, owing to his policy of continuing the war, the cost of living had risen alarmingly. The situation was worsened by a series of bad harvests, countered by an increase in imports of raw materials. On the other hand, the middle class had by now withdrawn its support for the war, and public opinion was confused because the union with Ireland of 1800 had led to concessions being given to the Irish. The peace of Amiens of 1802, however, contained, in its articles, the seeds of renewed hostilities. The year 1789 marks the beginning not only of the French Revolution, but also of African literature, with the autobiography, written in English, of Olaudah Equiano (1745–1797), a Nigerian slave who had bought his freedom from his master,

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The Wesleyan movement, however, as we have seen, did all it could to dampen the smouldering coals of rebellion by proposing the figure of the ‘intelligent artisan’ in order to neutralize potential violence from factoryworkers and farm-hands. Malthus himself in 1798 condoned government inaction by announcing that poverty was caused by rising population. In other words, the system of parliamentary government was not questioned, and had, indeed, by now become an integral part of British political life. What caused concern was the economy and the unresolved ‘social question’: Britain was still divided into ‘two nations’. 2. The Napoleonic wars were responsible for the first real holocaust of human lives in the modern age, but were not without their absurd, even comic side, described and ‘defused’ by more than one talented writer. From the time of the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt in 1798 and up to his death seven years later, Admiral Nelson was portrayed as a cat chasing the French mouse, here, there and everywhere, always arriving in just time to deprive him of the longed-for cheese. The nation rejoiced when he pursued the French fleet under Admiral Villeneuve across the seas of half the globe in 1805, shortly before the battle of Trafalgar on October 21, still celebrated as one of England’s greatest naval victories, achieved though it was at the cost of Nelson’s life. In February 1815 Napoleon evaded British security and escaped from the island of Elba. To avoid a repeat of this after Waterloo, the Emperor was despatched to St Helena (the British, at first exultant, then disillusioned, protested at the severity of the sentence). This burlesque subtext, or mock-heroic counterpoint, recounted by Stendhal and Thackeray, recalls the incongruities of English history before the arrival on the scene of William of Orange in 1688. Napoleon had attacked Austria, the homeland of the queen consort; their son, proclaimed by his exiled father Emperor of the French, was raised as an Austrian in Vienna and was prevented from succeeding to the title of Duke of Parma after his mother’s death. In any case, he died still young of tuberculosis. The infatuation with the French an American Quaker. After years at sea, during which, under the name of Gustavus Vassa, he sailed the Caribbean, trading and exploring, he settled in London. By now an educated baptized Christian, he obtained British citizenship, married an Englishwoman, and became an active force in the abolitionist movement.

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Revolution of writers born after 1770 knew no bounds: the hopes and promises of a new world order swept through the whole of Europe and beyond. Poets, novelists, essayists and playwrights condemned England’s war against France up to the peace of Amiens in 1802.4 Many English writers were life-long radicals, while others changed their opinion of Napoleon, whom they now saw as the classic liberator turned dictator. Several English poets went to Spain in 1808 to take part in the long drawn-out Peninsular War that saw the debut of Wellington (a century later, in 1936, another conflict summoned other idealists like Orwell and Auden). As we shall see, novels on oriental, Spanish and Arabic subjects were written to mask dreams and aspirations come to nought. Of course, Britain supported Greek independence from the Ottoman yoke, and fanned the flames of insurrection in Italy, Germany and other European countries against absolute monarchs and petty tyrants, fired by an authentic vocation of liberalism, or at least less illiberal government. So it cut a fine figure on the world stage. In reality, its aim was to defend and indeed increase her trade. A Europe divided into small states was an obstacle to the monopoly in the hands of the Napoleonic empire. Almost immediately, Napoleon implemented an expansionist strategy aimed at invading and occupying as much European territory as possible. However, he never quite made up his mind to do the same thing to Britain. Such an endeavour would have been much more difficult than, say, that of William the Conqueror 700 years earlier (to say nothing of the rout of the ‘Invincible Armada’ in 1588).5 French fleets were losing or had lost a consistent part of their strength; Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition had failed in its attempt to disrupt British trade with the East; the French and Spanish fleets were scattered and destroyed in 1805 by Nelson. These events made the possibility of a French invasion of England unlikely. The trade war launched by Napoleon with the European embargo

4

5

A. Maurois (History of England, Eng. trans., London 1956, 394) tells of a French secret agent, Chauvelin, who stirred up discontent, spreading propaganda in order to pave the way for revolution in England. The reaction of the British government was to restrict or suspend a number of civil rights. In 1797, a combination of fortuitous circumstances prevented a joint invasion from Brest and Flanders.

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had no long-term effects, as France depended on Britain for many raw materials, and because England soon established alternative channels for its supplies. Furthermore, while Britain had its ups and downs in the European wars, in India the French were definitively defeated and expelled, which led to an immense economic boost for the rival power.6 3. Napoleon still had one card up his sleeve, which, if played well, could have changed the outcome of the war: the Congress of Vienna had been in progress since the middle of 1814, after Napoleon’s abdication, and had concluded its proceedings ten days before Waterloo. In other words, Napoleon might still have surprised everyone and been transformed from a mouse into a cat. Victorious Britain laid few demands before the Congress, whose decisions combined the principle of the restoration of the status quo with that of spheres of influence. Britain made do with gaining a number of bridgeheads (Malta, Mauritius, Ceylon) that would ensure the continuation, and indeed, the strengthening of her trade monopoly. The new reactionary equilibrium was therefore not greatly contested by Britain, and all Castlereagh had to do in Vienna was to see that no power could become too strong. The British distrusted the Holy Alliance and refused to sign it, but they did sign the Quadruple in 1815. The so-called Peterloo Massacre in Manchester in 1819 ended in eleven dead and hundreds wounded, while the Cato Street Conspiracy to assassinate government ministers was discovered and foiled. So England was spared uprisings like those of 1820–1821 and the July Revolution of 1830 in Paris which had such a contagious effect on the rest of Europe. Through all this, Britain walked her own path. The only people to enrich themselves from the war were the landowners, thanks to an increase in corn production following the embargo on grain previously imported from Europe. After 1815 protectionist laws favoured the big farmers and at the same time raised the price of corn, creating discontent among the poorer sections of society, and leading to the creation of the Anti-Corn Law League. The industries which developed around the war effort demobilized, and unemployment 6

Britain had a smaller army, so is said to have paid, in the years up to 1815, 10,000 pounds to a coalition of European nations who had joined forces against Napoleon (‘Pitt’s gold’, cf. Maurois, op. cit., 395).

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rose further on account of the introduction of machines (with a corresponding rise in episodes of Luddite-inspired vandalism). Moderately appeasing policies were therefore adopted by successive ministries, which, before 1830, passed bills abolishing protectionism, legalizing trade unions, regulating work in factories, making laws more lenient, and repealing the ban on Catholics in public service (the Test Act). The July Revolution of 1830 did, however, have an indirect effect on British domestic politics, since it was thought prudent by the government of London to present a First Reform Bill,7 making the year 1832 a watershed in modern English history. Two such widely differing historians as Trevelyan and Hobsbawm agree in underlining the ‘non-repulsive’ contagion of the events in Paris in 1830 and the vital importance of that date for the maintaining of peace in Britain. § 158. English Romanticism It is hardly necessary to point out that the Romanticism I shall attempt to describe here is not that timeless cultural category often used in antithesis to the term ‘classical’, in a kind of systole-diastole relation which is as old as art itself. Equally obviously, I will confine myself here to a discussion of the English form of a phenomenon that takes on different characteristics in different countries. I shall also limit myself to a few, fleeting comments on the usual, well-known controversies about the etymology, dates and premonitory signs of Romanticism. In other words, European Romanticism in the fifty years enclosing the turn of the nineteenth century is the sum of various separate Romanticisms, and each national Romanticism contains within it a minimum common multiple without necessarily possessing all the other marks of Romanticism in the sense of ‘Über-Romanticism’, or the sum of all Romanticisms. In fact, I intend to present English Romanticism empirically, sequentially, in a range of exponents who, together with common characteristics, display other, more personal traits; we shall indeed see extreme cases, contemplated by Lotman’s cultural typology, of writers who are also, in a way, anti-Romantic, or become Romantic and then anti- in the course of their career. Like Modernism, Romanticism includes its contrary – for

7

On whose disruptive effects see Volume 4, §§ 1 and 7, passim.

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example, the ‘negative romanticism’ that Peckham1 has identified and analysed, above all, in Byron, which is, however only one side of the Romantic prism. In this regard, two epistemologically antithetical descriptions have been given of Romanticism: on the one hand, it is a cultural movement in which tout se tient, capable of being reconstructed in a frame of Cartesian geometry and symmetry; on the other, it is a kind of mysterious, distant nebula, a cultural phenomenon almost metaphysically unknowable and ineffable. This interpretation was initially put forward by A. O. Lovejoy (in a penetrating essay published in 1924),2 agreed with by Mittner,3 and taken on board by Bloom and the Yale school. To cut back drastically and focus on the landmarks of a discussion that has been going on for 200 years, René Wellek4 pinpointed and reduced the quintessence of Romanticism to three main features or emblematic markers: imagination, nature, and symbol-myth. But many other keys have been looked for and found, and the tabulations and formalizations of Romanticism are practically infinite. 2. The bibliography referring to Romanticism is by now so vast that it would fill volume upon volume if listed and discussed. I shall proceed economically and schematically, examining how Romanticism expresses itself in the various English authors who embrace it. To summarize: the term was originally used as a synonym of ‘fake’, in the sense of the fictitious content of pastoral and chivalric romance; then it was extended to include the idea of the picturesque and any strange spectacle to be found in nature. For the Germans it signified, above all, nostalgia, Sehnsucht, ineffability, the transfusion of the infinite into the finite (Novalis). Each national Romanticism has its own different birth and death dates: it originated first in Germany, followed by England; it arrived in Italy somewhat later, and much later in France (officially in 1827 with Hugo’s preface to

1 2 3 4

‘Towards a Theory of Romanticism’, PMLA, LXVI (1951), 5–23. ‘On the Discrimination of Romanticisms’, PMLA, XXXIX (1924), 229–53. According to Mittner, Romanticism ‘risks being denied […] in its unity’ (MIT, vol. II, 703). ‘The Concept of Romanticism in Literary History’, Comparative Literature, I (1949), 1–23, 147–72.

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Cromwell). Drawing isobars is perilous: for example, Keats and Leopardi concur on certain points but not on all; Manzoni is influenced by Scott but not all the time, and as a poet has little in common with the six major English Romantics.5 Tieck’s romantische Ironie (the destructive attitude towards one’s own work, with an acknowledgement of impotence and vanity) would seem to be absent, in general, from the English equivalent. As to the symptoms of approaching Romanticism, Rousseau had placed the centre of the universe in the single individual and preached a return to nature and a condemnation of progress, guilty of bringing nothing but unhappiness to men. Giambattista Vico had exalted the primitive phases of civilization, so fresh and spontaneous. Especially in England, classical Homer had surrendered his sceptre to the Celts, and Ossian was the object of Macpherson’s forgeries. With the diffusion throughout Europe of the ‘graveyard’ and ‘night’ poetry of Gray and Young, England contributed important elements to a pre-existing tradition of irrationality and mysticism. Later, the tide of influence changed, and it was Germany’s turn to offer models and inspiration in the form of Goethe’s erotic melancholy, Bürger’s ballads, and Schiller’s plays, which were translated by Scott and Coleridge and suggested to them themes and colours. So English Romanticism, in part derived and imported from various continental Romanticisms, was, in turn, exported, especially to France, in painting and music, and to Italy. 3. Proceeding in descending order of importance of salient points: English Romanticism, at least as regards Wordsworth and, above all, Coleridge, and, in part Shelley, stands out for having a philosophy and epistemology which, derived from Kant via his German mediators – all, in turn, grafted onto the tradition of English empiricism – resurface in the memorable metaphors of Coleridge’s three ‘demonic’ poems.6 Romantic art aspires to the absolute by means of symbol, not to be confused with allegory: it is a holistic art, an epiphanic intuition of the fusion of the self and god, or of the self and the non-self in nature; or as an exploration of the infinite, something quite close to the threshold of the noumenon. The Romantic epiphany represents an extraordinary transition to different 5 6

Cf. also MIT, vol. II, 701. §§ 187–5.

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dimensions, but, quantum-like, disappears as soon as it is experienced. It therefore welcomes all those transcendental foundations that ‘vault’ rationalism. The principal opposition is imagination versus rationalism: only through the imagination can we perceive the immanence of the divine in the universe. The primacy awarded to nature goes against the position of Locke: imagination is not arbitrary and is a vehicle for truth. This cognitive experience may also be procured by means of opium or absinthe, and dreams or hypnosis constitute a new form and a new repository of poetic material. It is striking that, for a period of fifty years starting in about 1780, critical theory explodes and develops at the same speed as poetic practice – Wordsworth and Coleridge in particular; but the poetic theorists are numberless, all eagerly proposing myriad arguments, many of them amateurish, confused and approximate, aimed at defining the true nature of poetry and the poet’s modus operandi. It is a fact that the two most important theorists of the period are Wordsworth, whose poetics were laid out in a short, simple Preface, and Coleridge, more learned and voluminous, who took many of his ideas from German aesthetologists. Shelley wrote a defence of poetry, but Keats, like Byron, limited himself to a number of aphorisms scattered here and there in his letters, while Blake cloaked his thoughts in esoteric manifestos. In his The Mirror and the Lamp (New York 1953), M. H. Abrams was the first to examine and discuss the fundamental shift in English Romantic aesthetics: poetic theory was no longer mimetic, but expressive, the centre of gravity no longer the poetry itself but the poet. The semiotic circuit changed, as did that of the path of transmission; the relationship between poetry and the poet had become more important that the one between the poet and his reader.7 On the plane of the psychology of art, the Romantic artist’s primary concern is to declare his own self and individual experience. The most appropriate metaphor for conveying the essence of poetry is no longer a mirror reflecting nature, but a fountain, or a lamp and a plant (Spinoza’s ‘natura naturans’ as against ‘natura naturata’), or the centre and the circumference. The late seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonists – or, as Abrams puts it with a 7

Romantic criticism itself – Lamb, for example, or Hazlitt – is thus forced to focus on the author and not – or not so much – on the work.

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play on words, the ‘Plotinists’ – had conceived of poetry as an interaction between inside and out, together with the clear-cut opposition between Illuminist and organicist mechanisms. The fragmentism present in all the English Romantics is a mimetic consequence of the ontological fact that art is like a plant, forever growing. Together with Plotinus, however, Longinus, too, becomes the mentor of the Romantics, dethroning Aristotle, because poetry is the language of feelings, and, historically speaking, predates prose; of the poetic forms, the lyric genre is obviously the ideal vehicle of poetic genesis. Longinus is the distant inspirer of the theory of poetry as a flash, that considers the long poem, in Poe’s words, a contradiction in terms. Romantic poetry, in this sense, typical of primitive societies in which rhythmic, figurative language originated, was the opposite of all cognitive language. 4. In common with almost all literary movements, the six principal Romantic poets were thus labelled by the next generation, while their contemporaries often identified them by means of pejorative nicknames – the ‘Lake Poets’ (Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey), or the ‘Cockney School’ (Hunt and Keats), or the ‘Satanic school’ (Shelley, Byron and their ‘group’). As a ‘historical category’8 English Romanticism is a case of a ‘sensibility in progress’, with successive phases and sub-phases as well as synchronic or unmatching faces. The identikit of the Romantic artist is contradiction, at the very least: he is either a believer or a non-believer; wide awake or dozy; busy or an idler. A rebellious Titan, egotistic and individualistic, he wages war on an incipient or chronic philistinism, and, since he feels out of place wherever he is, is forever a stranger and an exile in spirit. Some English Romantics choose as their habitats the Lake District, others the Swiss, French or Italian Alps, the gulfs and coasts of Italy and historic cities like Venice, Florence, Pisa, Ravenna and Naples. Lamb is one exception, but there are others who, like him, can live only in London, which, thanks to some strange optical illusion, is, in their eyes, the best of all possible worlds.9 A similar contradiction led

8 9

MIT, vol. II, 701ff. To the contrary, for Shelley, ‘Hell is a city much like London’ (Peter Bell the Third, l. 147).

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the poet to believe his ideal reader was the common man, whereas what he really longed for was an ideal reader; when the ideal reader was not forthcoming, the poet withdrew into isolation. Often active, friendly, optimistic, he could also be melancholy, depressed, misanthropic and hypochondriac when not actually sick. Praz took this last ‘algolagnic’ sub-category as the starting point for his acclaimed study of Romantic sensibility, La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica (1930), which shifts the focus onto the pathological – though not forgetting that the phenomenon was rather marginal and, in England, quite imperceptible. But it was a symptom of several different types of Romanticism. The Romantic poet needed a helpmate, a woman who not only satisfies his sexual needs, but who is also his muse, so much so that English Romanticism numbers several important female authors, not just secondary or subservient figures. From a political point of view, Romanticism espoused the struggle for national independence wherever it manifested itself (the principle of every nation’s right to be independent was denied and crushed by the multi-ethnic Ottoman and Habsburg empires). In England, poets spoke out against the anti-French policies of the ministries that feared the contagion of revolution, and demanded greater social and ideological freedom. Many of them at first supported the uprisings in Italy, Spain, Greece and Poland, but then were disillusioned. Some, however, remained faithful to their hopes and ideals. 5. As I mentioned, at a time when poetry dominated the literary scene, it was the lyric genre that was considered the highest form of composition. One of the recurring categories of lyrical poetry might be called ‘conversation poetry’ which starts from a reflection ‘inside’, is projected ‘outside’, and then returns ‘inside’; a triadic procedure, once again paradigmatically based on Coleridge’s ‘Rime’, describes the allegorical pilgrimage of a character, at first in society, then isolated, and then, back in society. Considering the Copernican revolution alluded to above – and the centrality of the poet and his mental labour – after the short lyric comes the autobiographical poem, in the sense of ‘the development of a mind’. In prosody and literary forms, eighteenth-century poetic diction, based on the rhyming couplet, is replaced by a language near to the actual speech of real people; the ballad and the sonnet are the predominant forms. There are also hybrid forms, like the ‘lyrical ballad’, or the lyrical drama, poetic autobiographies, and

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illustrated texts, as in the case of Blake. The theatre was not silent, literally, but became largely popular entertainment, melodrama, vaudeville, or bloody murders and hair-raising ghosts to keep the workers happy. When the great poets tried their hands at playwriting, the result was often a disappointing imbalance between larger-than-life characters à la Tamburlaine, and the vague, shadowy figures they are surrounded by; the endless bombastic soliloquies of these ‘Marlovian’ heroes succeed inevitably in crippling whatever plot there is. Byron, the only one who writes extensively for the theatre, but with hardly great results, diverges from the common Romantic path with his mock-heroic poems and verse satires. After 1814 a lone figure arose to challenge the almost undisputed sway of poetry: Walter Scott, now a novelist, formerly a poet. Ever since the middle of the eighteenth century children’s literature had flourished, almost exclusively by women, who flooded the market with all sorts of genres and subgenres, employing a wide range of modes and modulations of the narrating voice. For reasons of priority and dates of composition and publication, I shall begin this fifth part of my volume with Fanny Burney, a soft, muted introduction before the crescendo to fortissimo of the giants of the Romantic movement. The most obvious feature of Romanticism in its ‘purest’ form, it might be argued, is to be identified in the information and diffusion channels – the cultural media, we would call them today: the high- and middle-brow journals and reviews,10 mass publishing, circulating libraries, scientific societies, all phenomena that bridge the gap between high and popular culture. Any account of Romanticism, and most certainly the English version, should therefore be stereophonic, because, in a very short time frame, a great number of quite different and incompatible aesthetics and forms clamour to be heard. In the pages that follow, I, too, will mix a geographical approach with a chronological one, or one based on gender; the reader will find sub-sections of female Romantic writers discussed as a group, while other sub-sections will examine writers from geographical 10 The Edinburgh Review was started in 1802 by the critic, Francis Jeffrey, and was followed by the Quarterly in 1809; both represent moderately conservative positions compared with the poets, who are often severely criticized. By 1824, there were half a dozen reviews in circulation.

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areas like Scotland and Ireland. Full-blown or ‘high’ Romanticism and Biedermeier11 are not so much a sequence, with the latter following the former, as contemporaneous. Jane Austen, in particular, is to be numbered among the anti-Romantics. In short, the Romanticism of the poets does not occupy the entire historical period of Romanticism: there is no lack of misfits, rivals and outsiders. 6. The first contemporary reactions to Romanticism – by Lamb, Hazlitt, and Peacock – were, at first, enthusiastic, but gradually cooled, as we shall see later in the various individual sections. Arnold, already a post-Romantic in poetry, as a critic sought to ‘contain and ‘desensitize’ Romanticism;12 an out-and-out attack was launched by the Modernism of Hulme and Eliot in particular, before deconstruction attempted to show that Modernism masks ‘a coexistence with the movement that preceded it and against which it fought’.13 Understandably, purely academic perspectives were polarized by the Second World War, and in a book published in 1942,14 Albert Guerard surprisingly saw in certain aspects of Romanticism – the exaltation of freedom from all forms of discipline, incitement to mysticism and support for national unity and independence – a dangerous apology for fascism in its various guises. The American neo-Humanism of Abrams and his followers, on the contrary, saw in Romanticism a great message of freedom thanks to the joint strength of the ideals of the Revolution and the home-grown apocalypticism of English Nonconformism. In the 1960s Abrams, and, above all, Frye supported the thesis that the dreams of rebirth having failed, the urge for renewal is transferred, in the Romantics, from the external world of historical events to the inner dimension of the human spirit. Under the influence of Abrams’s second book, Natural Supernaturalism (New York 1971) – which argues that the shattered dream of political reform withdraws to a kind of inner Eden – subtle, hidden political consequences were later exposed by arguments that are at times specious judgements of intents (like the supposed reason for which Wordsworth 11 12 13 14

See below the sections on Lamb, Southey and others. Volume 4, §§ 148–70 passim. Volume 7, § 75.2. The France of Tomorrow, Cambridge, MA 1942.

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does not say anything about the actual abbey in his ‘Tintern Abbey’, and what the place meant to him symbolically and emotionally). Towards the end of the last century, Abrams’s view was contested or shelved by the three most influential critical schools of the day: poststructuralism, New Historicism, and feminism. The first set about exploring and deconstructing, in the wake of Derrida, the transcendental claims of Romanticism, their illusory nature and their failure (De Man, Hartman); the poststructuralists also aimed at proving that symbols do not succeed in acting as a cohesive factor between consciousness and reality; in line with Lacan’s theories, the entire Romantic movement was seen as tending towards the ‘symbolic’ and the ‘imaginary’. ‘A breath of fresh air’ was felt to be needed recently after decades of abstruse and esoteric speculations of the secret meanings at the heart of Romantic poetry. Critical revisionism has insisted on the need to go beyond the customary, restrictive, male-centred interpretation. It has proposed a ‘new Romanticism’ no longer based on the primacy of lyrical poetry, but open to other genres, even finding room for ‘a-Romantics’ – that is to say, camouflaged or politicized Romantics hiding behind their apparent silence. Among these are Jane Austen, or the entire Gothic fashion, with others like Crabbe, for whom nature is a gloomy backdrop rather than a source of spiritual refreshment. Today’s canonical Romanticism includes, above all, a wide range of female writers, especially poets, examined in part in my Volume 4 insofar as they are also Victorian from a chronological point of view,15 while others of less documentary value will be analysed in greater depth in the following pages.16 7. Romantic artists echoed the poets by abandoning photographic painting in favour of subjective reactions to landscape, and for one of the first times in history, England produces painters, like Constable and Turner, who dominate the European artistic scene. Their work can even be read in terms of Pater’s Anderstreben in the arts: Turner adds couplets to his canvases; Constable is often called the Wordsworth of painting (for his 15 16

Volume 4, § 216. § 222. See especially The New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse, ed. J. McGann, Oxford 1993, and Antologia delle poetesse romantiche inglesi, ed. L. M. Crisafulli, 2 vols, Roma 2003, who also edited, with C. Pietropoli, Le poetesse romantiche inglesi, Roma 2002.

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scientific study of nature, and his rejection of imitation and mannerisms),17 while ‘historical’ painters, like the writers of historical novels, carefully research the backgrounds of their subjects in order to achieve the greatest possible accuracy. In some cases – the most obvious example is Blake – the painter is also a poet, a visionary who uses the palette to give body to his dreams and nightmares and the subconscious in general, such as we find in Fuseli, or in the curious attraction felt by the English for the eerie series of etchings by Piranesi called ‘Le Carceri’. The same antithesis between ‘high’ and ‘middle-class’ Romanticism can be seen in the co-existence of the beautiful and the sublime with the ‘merely’ picturesque. Wilkie’s ‘cottage art’ was synonymous with domestic and oleographic paintings featuring peasants and beggars; Gilpin painted – and theorized on – the picturesque genre. The ‘English garden’ reproduced mimetically the ‘untidy orderliness’ and therefore the ‘naturalness’ of nature itself. In architecture, too, the Gothic prevailed over the classical style because of a picturesque, legendary analogy which suggested that the Gothic arch represented the mimesis of the intertwining boughs of two adjacent trees. Blake stated that the classical style was ‘mathematical’, by which he meant ‘cerebral’. Music was another of the many metaphors that Romantic aesthetic used to refer to poetry: it was a natural progression from ut pictura poesis to ut musica poesis, especially in opera and the symphony, but also in piano nocturnes and the Lied, as an expression of pure feeling and mysterious forms of energy. But in the forty years of English Romanticism, music is silent as a creative art, and, with the exception of the Irishman, John Field, no great composers emerge from the British Isles. However, Shakespeare inspires Mendelssohn, and Scott Beethoven, while Scott’s novels provided stories for indifferent librettos for Donizetti, Rossini and Verdi – an example of what Hazlitt called the decomposition of Romantic poetry into prose.18

17

18

Constable’s telegraphic annotations in his diary resemble those in Hopkins’s Journal. While both Constable and Turner can be said to study light, Constable does so as a calm, careful recorder and sketcher, while Turner is obsessed by, and fears the creative and destructive force of what he considers to be a metaphysical entity, not unlike Shelley’s ‘west wind’. § 226.

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§ 159. Burney The first ten pages of one of Virginia Woolf ’s finest essays, included in the second series of The Common Reader,1 are a demonstration of the uncanny ability of great writers to ‘connect’ with writers of the past, kindred souls with whom they feel particular affinity. In her essay, Woolf argues that whatever issued from the pen of Fanny Burney (1752–1840, after her marriage, also known as Madame Frances d’Arblay)2 was the fruit of a precocious, morbid relationship with words. The reconstruction of King’s Lynn and then Poland Street, in London, shows clearly that Woolf saw her own childhood world, the ultimate source of all she wrote, as coinciding emotionally with that of the Burney children. Fanny, like Virginia, had ‘a room of her own’, a shed in her stepmother’s back garden, which looked out on the river echoing with the cries of seamen. Here she poured out her half-suppressed and restless love of writing, struggling against an ingrained sense of decorum that decreed that women should not write, while she wrote and wrote because ‘so keen was the joy’. Compare: ‘Fanny’s attitude to language was altogether a little abnormal’. She was ‘immensely susceptible to the power of words’. She adored ‘fluency and the sound of language pouring warmly and copiously over the printed page’. All this took place in a domestic context that resembled, or that Virginia Woolf made similar to, that of her own childhood, as described in the opening pages of To the Lighthouse: is not Doctor Burney – forever ‘writing furiously, surrounded by notebooks, in his study’ – an ‘absent’ parent like Mr Ramsay? Was he not like the other, a bit of a scatterbrain, with thousands of projects and activities vying with each other, adored by his daughter,

1 2

‘Dr Burney’s Evening Party’ (TCR, Second Series, 108–16). After four miserable years as ‘keeper of the robes’ to Queen Charlotte, Burney was given her freedom and a pension of 100 pounds. In 1793 she married a former adjutant to Lafayette, the French general, Alexandre D’Arblay, then a penniless émigré in London. In 1802, the couple went to France, where Fanny was obliged to stay after the Napoleonic war broke out again. After Waterloo, the D’Arbleys settled in Bath, where the husband died. Fanny went to London, where she occupied herself with the education of her son and the Memoirs of her father.

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Fanny, who acted as his amanuensis? Had not Fanny lost her mother, and was not the household made of the dead mother’s children and those of the new Mrs Burney? Furthermore, the various components of the mixed ‘litter’ got on well together, forever laughing and joking, exploring worlds of fable and fantasy, protected from the world of the grown-ups by their own, incomprehensible linguistic code. All the Burneys were talented, as were all those belonging to the Stephen family: ‘Charles was a scholar; James was a humorist; Fanny was a writer; Susan was musical’. The nostalgia inherent in this fixation with an infantile Garden of Eden, and the inevitable breaking of the spell that follows in a successive phase, can be found in Woolf ’s above-mentioned essay, in the section beginning with the words used in the title of the second part of To the Lighthouse: ‘So time passed …’. Whoever reads the first page of Fanny Burney’s diary,3 in which the fifteen-year-old shrewdly dedicates it to ‘Mr Nobody’, discovers not only the passionate, though, disguised, need of someone to write to, and the situation of personal and feminine isolation which will re-emerge in the novels, but also the beginnings of that naïve, breezy attitude to be found in women authors of the mid-twentieth century. For all of seventy-two years, Fanny Burney kept this diary, which constitutes an important record of a segment of English history seen from a personal, selective and arbitrary viewpoint; above all it is a series of snapshots that convey the sense of discovery, of joy and trembling, almost like that of Eve on the threshold of her new world. Nothing similar to this personal note will be heard until the middle of the century, with Elizabeth Gaskell. Cover up the writer’s name with your hand and you hear the reedy, ironic, ultrasensitive tones of Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen and Rosemond Lehmann.

3

First published in reduced form in seven volumes in 1842–1846, it was republished, complete with the correspondence, in 12 vols, ed. J. Hemlow et al., Oxford 1972–1984 (a selection is available, ed. L. Gibbs, London 1940). A new edition of the court diaries and letters, various editors, in 6 vols, was begun in 2011 for Oxford University Press. The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (1768–1783) are edited by L. Troide, 5 vols, Montreal 1988–2012.

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2. Fanny Burney’s irrepressible urge to write (I will discuss pauses and suspensions later),4 found expression in four novels (three of which are longer than the average Victorian serial), eight plays, only one of which was staged during her lifetime, and a biography of her father, Charles Burney (1832), an organist and harpsichordist who not only taught music, but was also engaged on a universal history of music, and entertained in his home the cream of English cultural society – Johnson, Garrick, Burke, Sheridan and the Thrales. The four novels, starting from the titles (all proper names, including the last one, an antonomasia), taken all together, present a multi-faceted study of the condition of women; the repeated theme is the difficulty faced by a young woman in her debut into society, obviously a reflexion of the author’s own experience. Her personal myth is that of a respectable, sensible young woman who has lost her father; in fact Fanny corresponded at length with a kind of father-figure in the person of Samuel Crisp, a friend of her father’s. In all four cases, the search for an identity focuses on a surname, and if a happy ending is forthcoming, one suspects it is purely conventional. As the first novel is epistolary and the others narrated in the third person, they can be said to belong to the eighteenth-century tradition of Richardson, Fielding and Smollett. A successive link can be found in Jane Austen;5 but there are also prophetic signs of a kind of fiction that would soon be all the rage – the so-called ‘silver fork’ novel, with its portrayal of aristocrats and parvenus.6 Slightly further in the future stands the towering figure of Dickens at his most sensationalistic, surrealistic and Gothic, as seen in his long, multifocal masterpieces, packed full of minor characters and secondary plots. Fanny Burney’s fourth novel reaches out to Wilkie Collins. Her first three novels were hugely successful, and were, for 4

5 6

When her father discovered she was the author of Eveline, he feared that his patrons would take exception at finding themselves named in the book and that his own career might suffer; he opposed the performance of her plays, starting with The Witlings (1779), a transparent satire of bluestockings, especially Mrs Montagu. In Chapter 7 of Northanger Abbey, John Thorpe calls Camilla ‘a stupid book, written by that woman they make such a fuss about, she who married the French emigrant’; but, naturally, the judgement is ironic, coming as it does from an uneducated boor. Volume 5, § 10.1, and appropriate entry in the Thematic index.

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a long time, the talk of the town, thanks also to the blessing of Dr Johnson and his circle. She was a reference point in the sphere of the novel during the first decades of the nineteenth century. Gradually, however, the reading public lost interest in her and her novels, with the exception of Evelina; excessive length and slow-moving plots were the main factors in their loss of popularity, and it must be said that, had it not been for feminist criticism, she would have passed into obscurity. Evelina, an epistolary novel consisting of about eighty letters, was written in secret and published anonymously in 1778 when Burney was only twenty-six. The precociously Victorian, rather far-fetched story involves an irresponsible father who abandons his wife before the birth of Evelina, who is brought up by a tutor not knowing whose daughter she is, and under a false surname. Courted by a great many suitors, she stands out in society for her common sense. She would be totally happy were it not for her cousins, eccentric, vulgar gaffeurs,7 and her nosey maternal aunt, the survivor of several marriages, characters that nettle Evelina herself, but provide the reader with a certain amount of welcome comic relief. The plot becomes complicated with dreadful misunderstandings, awful predicaments and sensational events. Worthy of Wilkie Collins is the discovery of a letter written on her death-bed by Evelina’s mother in which she declares she will forgive her husband if he recognizes Evelina as his legitimate child. The denouement takes place when the father discovers that the daughter he was led to believe was his, was, in fact, that of the nurse, and recognizes Evelina as his real daughter thanks to her resemblance to the mother. Evelina achieves security in her marriage with Lord Orville, a kind of Richardson’s Grandison. As Dr Johnson pointed out, the numerous secondary characters belong to the satirical tradition of Fielding and Smollett. 3. The lightness of touch of Evelina is nowhere to be seen in Cecilia (1782) and Camilla (1796), replaced by an ever-increasing insistence on an unstable society, as seen in the large number of characters with nervous tics and eccentric behaviour, symptoms of an inner, and at the same time, 7

The Branghtons, a name that became proverbial, especially in the letter about ‘an evening at the opera’.

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societal disease.8 The second of these two novels was written under the effect of the truly infernal, bewildering five years spent in the company of Queen Charlotte – in her diary, Burney makes light of what must have been a difficult situation in her famous ‘Instructions for coughing, sneezing and moving before the king and queen’. The unsatisfactory results of her literary efforts in Cecilia and Camilla, with the exception of a few caricatures and the odd satirical episode, were also caused by the difficulty of inventing and controlling plots no longer based on letters – and, in any case, quite flimsy – but, in both cases, a kind of multifocal, third-person narrative, marred, to boot, by an excess of moralizing, melodramatic and incredible coincidences, and pathos. The symbolic lack of a surname – Wilkie Collins was to write a novel on illegitimacy with the title No Name – resurfaces in Cecilia in the case of the rich heiress who gives her name to the novel: if she gives up her maiden name by marrying, she will lose her inheritance; her husband must take her surname, but this is something her betrothed refuses to do. An absurd stalemate based on formalities and prejudice is the result. The main plot is accompanied by a quite unnecessary subplot involving an impecunious brother and sister fighting their way out of poverty. Cecilia’s marriage is hindered by a villain with the same name as one of Collins’s future characters, Mocknton,9 who, counting on his present wife’s early demise, takes to courting Cecilia, who is so distressed by this attention that she loses her mind and almost dies. In the end, everything is sorted out. Camilla, which is even longer, overflows with anticipations of sensationalism, at the same time admonishing womanly

8

9

In the first part of Cecilia, the disturbed, dissolute tutor, Harrel, attempts suicide after losing Cecilia’s whole fortune at the gambling table. Other minor characters, too, illustrate a precocious ‘cash nexus’ in the ‘gold rush’ in English society at the end of the eighteenth century. The theme is present in all of Burney’s novels; she was aware of the family’s precarious financial circumstances, and accepted the urgings of her father to write and publish as much as she could while she was still popular. The three novels that followed Evelina brought in a huge amount of money; it must be added that each one was longer than the one before to justify the price. Volume 5, § 170.5.

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innocence and naïvety, and presenting an early criticism of impulsive, sentimental Romanticism. At first Camilla loves Edgar, who, in turn, is loved by the beautiful but insipient Indiana. Indiana spurns Edgar to see just how much Camilla loves him. Trouble strikes not only the main character (she is mistaken for a prostitute and thief, and is easily gulled by wicked counsellors and unscrupulous suitors), but also her sister and brother; the author’s intention is, no doubt, to highlight the disastrous effects of society life without vigilance and moral strength. The happy ending might be ironic because it is conjured up at the very last minute, with Edgar, disguised as a priest, listening to Camilla as she confesses her love for him. The Wanderer, begun in the first years of the new century, and completed and published only in 1814, has been the most criticized of Burney’s novels ever since Macaulay savaged it. In reality, it is the most modern and striking of the four, and resembles, in the virtuoso handling of the complex plot, not only the Victorian sensation novel but even those of a postmodernist writer like John Fowles. The main character is yet another version of the author herself: a music teacher and resourceful actress who struggles to get by in London in the years immediately following the French Revolution. This is probably Burney’s most intriguing exploration of the theme of the ‘nameless’. The opening is striking: among the passengers on board a boat carrying a number of English travellers back to England is a ‘nameless’ woman, who then becomes known as Ellis after the initials L. S. are seen on a letter. She is on the run from a persecutor, who manages to find her in London. As in all the best sensation novels, her past is brought to light little by little in the course of the story. The Wanderer is also the first novel to deal with the French Revolution and its aftermath, predictably from a ‘conservative’, anti-French point of view: the Jacobin she had been blackmailed into marrying dies, and Juliet Granville – such is her real name – is free to marry her suitor, the patient, faithful, upright English soldier, Harleigh.10

10

The demonic counterpart of Juliet has been read as referring to Mary Wollstonecraft.

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§ 160. Austen* I: Janeites and Austenophobes I will discuss in due course the problem of whether Scott is to be considered the ‘father’ of the nineteenth-century novel in English. What is certain is that Jane Austen (1775–1817) is the ‘mother’ (maybe, to some extent, ‘father’ too) in that she precedes and influences the novelists, both 1

*

The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen, ed. J. Todd et al., 9 vols, Cambridge 2009. Letters, ed. R. W. Chapman, Oxford 1932, and, expanded, 1952, now replaced by Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. D. Le Faye, Oxford and New York 1995. Life. J. E. Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen, London 1870 (by the novelist’s nephew); E. Jenkins, Jane Austen; A Biography, London 1938, 1948, 1986; M. Laski, Jane Austen and her World, London 1969; D. Cecil, A Portrait of Jane Austen, London 1978; J. Halperin, The Life of Jane Austen, Brighton 1984; P. Honan, Jane Austen: A Life, London 1987; C. Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life, London 1997; D. Nokes, Jane Austen, London 1998. Criticism. M. Lascelles, Jane Austen and her Art, Oxford 1939, 1941, 1963; M. Mudrick, Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery, Princeton, NJ 1952; A. H. Wright, Jane Austen’s Novels: A Study in Structure, London 1953, Harmondsworth 1962; H. S. Babb, Jane Austen’s Novels: The Fabric of Dialogue, Columbus, OH 1962; R. Liddell, The Novels of Jane Austen, London 1963; W. A. Craik, Jane Austen: The Six Novels, London 1965, 1966, 1968; A. W. Litz, Jane Austen: A Study of Her Artistic Development, New York 1965; CRHE, ed. B. C. Southam, 2 vols, London 1968 and 1987; C. Gillie, A Preface to Jane Austen, New York 1974; M. Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, Oxford 1975 and, revised with a long introduction, 1987; B. Hardy, A Reading of Jane Austen, London 1975; G. Spina, Linee classiche della narrativa di Jane Austen, Genova 1975; G. Bompiani, Lo spazio narrante: Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, Sylvia Plath, Milano 1978, 2010; D. Bush, Jane Austen, London 1978; J. P. Brown, Jane Austen’s Novels: Social Change and Literary Form, Cambridge 1979; B. Battaglia, La zitella illetterata: parodia e ironia nei romanzi di Jane Austen, Ravenna 1983, Napoli 2009; M. Kirkham, Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction, Brighton 1983; Jane Austen, ed. H. Bloom, New York 1986; The Jane Austen Companion: With a Dictionary of Jane Austen’s Life and Works, ed. J. D. Grey, London 1986; T. Tanner, Jane Austen, Basingstoke 1986, 1987; M. Williams, Jane Austen: Six Novels and Their Method, London 1986; R. Bertinetti, Ritratti di signore: saggio su Jane Austen, Milano 1987; C. Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel, Chicago, IL 1988; L. Mooneyham, Romance, Language and Education in Jane Austen’s Novels, Basingstoke 1988; A. Sulloway, Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood, Philadelphia, PA 1989; G. Gigli Ferreccio, La passione dell’ironia: saggio su Jane Austen, Torino 1990; D. Kaplan, Jane Austen Among Women, Baltimore, MD 1992; The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, ed. E. Copeland and J. McMaster, Cambridge 1997;

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male and female, that follow her.1 She does this, first of all, by giving her personal version of a female consciousness hungering for authenticity. It must be admitted that the only future this consciousness contemplates is married life, and that the sole concern of every woman is to find a husband, and thus substitute, as feminists would say, patriarchal with marital tyranny. But she insists on choosing her own partner, and besieged on all sides, resists the most relentless onslaughts and goes on to win her battle for self-determination. The ‘Victorian’ double standard already existed in Austen’s day; exceptions to the rule were those parents how allowed their daughters to exercise this freedom of choice. For decades, feminism has dominated the field of Austen criticism, with hair-splitting, esoteric discussions involving various schools of thought, starting with the first classic formalization by Gilbert and Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic; but the essential point is what I have said above. The other side of the coin is that in Austen we find a population of males of whom the vast majority are scoundrels interested only in money, and a tiny minority – maybe one per cent – of high-minded, disinterested ‘gentlemen’ (in the modern sense of the word). However, Austen does not give any leads for future female colleagues – and finds herself, as it were, in a blind alley – when she embarks on a fierce literary and epistemological campaign against the Gothic and the Romantic, because the great achievements of the Brontës, Gaskell and George Eliot are the fruit of a mingling of realism with sensational and melodramatic elements. So, almost immediately, her ‘pre-minimalistic’ aesthetic of ‘scaling down’ ceased to be attractive, and she was accused of not being sufficiently shocking or amazing;2 her novels were dismissed C. Shields, Jane Austen, New York 2001; J. Ross, Jane Austen: A Companion, London 2002; D. A. Miller, Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style, Princeton, NJ 2003; P. Dilonardo, Lettrici, gentiluomini e biblioteche: il romance della lettura in Jane Austen, Bari 2004; K. Olsen, All Things Austen: An Encyclopedia of Austen’s World, 2 vols, Westport, CT and London 2005; Jane Austen in Context, ed. J. M. Todd, Cambridge 2005, also author of The Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen, Cambridge 2006; A Companion to Jane Austen, ed. C. L. Johnson and C. Tuite, Oxford 2009. 1 2

A quip by Saintsbury (SAI, 683). Once again, SAI, 681.

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as arid and dull, and her dialogues judged all too full of Restoration wit. However, Austen was to find new life, 150 years later, in writers, like her, photographic and tersely realistic, subtly and vigilantly ironic, such as Ivy Compton-Burnett, Barbara Pym and Anita Brookner, and in male novelists like Forster. To consider Austen the ‘mother’ of the Victorian novelists entails the presupposition that she is a ‘social’ writer concerned with the ‘condition of England’ at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, just as Dickens and Eliot and Gaskell were later in the century. Austen’s fifth work, Mansfield Park, portrays a nation in the process of evolving, and as such is the closest in the canon to the general idea of a Victorian or Dickensian serial, absolute while still being contingent. It is also true that the whole of the Austen corpus is alive with other kinds of suggestions. 2. So, Austen can be considered both mother and father of female and male novelists to come, but with various predictable gaps and caveats, mainly as regards style, subjects, geography, social spectrum and human morphology. The first of these ‘gaps’ derives from the author’s decision to deliberately narrow her field of vision. She famously stated that she refused to write about things she had no direct experience of. Another definition of her aesthetics is the equally famous reference to the ‘little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour’. She referred dismissively to the human contexts of her novels as ‘three or four families in a country village’. She was very careful not to overreach her skills by venturing into more fashionable kinds of writing, and politely refused when the Prince Regent’s librarian suggested she write a historical novel ‘illustrative of the august house of Coburg’. While novelists are often expected to be consistent, and rebuked for excessive variety, Jane Austen has been accused of being monotonous, her novels all very much the same, variations on the theme of a sensible young woman in search of a husband, weighing up which of several suitors it would be best to choose, all wrinkles and rough edges smoothed out, all excesses or shortcomings absorbed by the final marriage vows. As with Fanny Burney, to whom she is indebted at times, Jane Austen depicts a range of intelligent heroines, as indicated in the titles of the six novels, or their first versions, some of them being female names. Geographically speaking, Austen limits

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her vision to a small area in the south-west of England, to the exclusion of the north. She concentrates for the most part on life in provincial England, on the routine that falsifies the hierarchy of human values, creates optical illusions, generates neuroses and is subject to misconceptions, like excessive class consciousness and the subjection to formal codes of behaviour and etiquette. Her novels focus on the movements of extended communities formed by relatives, along with their friends and companions, or groups of wealthy individuals who move periodically, leasing historic country houses and striking up relationships with the locals, only to up-sticks all of a sudden and move on, leaving only a letter behind them. The characters usually come in pairs or threesomes of sisters, though occasionally there is only one heroine involved. One or two protagonists, with different temperaments, opposing aims within one personality, seek the perfect match, and, rudderless, pitch here and there, usually missing Mr Right and falling prey to some schemer, or womanizer who passes himself off for a man of principle, but in reality will stoop to anything – including calumny and tale-telling – in order to further his sordid interests. Mr Right usually comes to the fore towards the end, after appearing, at first, colourless, stand-offish, bad-tempered – in short, decidedly unpleasant – only to reveal himself all of a sudden as highly respectable and just the right man for our heroine. A few secrets are revealed just before the end of the novel, radically changing the way the story unfolds. These refer to facts involving various characters who do not reveal them for a series of unconvincing reasons, and which, if uncovered earlier, would have dealt a death blow to the novel itself. The middle class is the section of society scrutinized by the author, herself a member of that same class. More precisely, we are talking about what is called the expanding ‘rentier bourgeoisie’, who lived in inherited properties and did not need to work, or enjoyed an income from plantations in the West Indies (for example, Antigua, where Fanny Price’s uncle goes in Mansfield Park). Recurring figures are relatively young retired admirals, captains and colonels (like Austen’s own brothers), or curates promised a living. Work as a means of subsistence, or simply as an ennobling human activity forms no part of Austen’s world. On the other hand, the English working man is almost completely absent from the entirety of the nineteenth-century novel, a charge made by Orwell against Dickens himself.

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There is one exception in Austen, and that exception becomes the rule: the daughters of impoverished middle-class families can find employment, if they wish, as governesses, and Jane Fairfax is the first of many such figures starting with the novels by the Brontë sisters. The social spectrum presented in Austen’s works does not include the London of the court and political power, or the aristocracy as such. Nor is the ‘serving class’ represented, or farmworkers, or the factory workers of the textile and mining industries. 3. There are two major omissions in Austen’s world: one derives from a Lukacsian parameter, and refers to the fact that she is silent on the great upheavals of her day. She lived and wrote during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars but appears deaf to the clamour of both. Only the faintest vibrations of what is happening on the Continent reach her finished novels, so that she has long been considered behind the times and far from the social and cultural mainstream. Her six completed novels belong to more or less the same time span as the works of Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and Byron, but, as I mentioned, atmosphere and outlook are immeasurably distant from the Romantic sensibility; they skip ‘high Romanticism’ and land feet-first in mid-nineteenth-century Biedermeier. In her novels the reader finds no flights of transcendental imagination, no spiritual exploration, no ‘Romantic agony’. The action is mostly indoors, and consists invariably of a succession of visits and meetings involving the various characters, with descriptions of the rites of courtship, and the rituals of gossip, envy, and, occasionally, back-biting. Old men condemned to a sedentary lifestyle and fearful of eating too much or catching a cold, vigorous young men and timorous maidens for whom the greatest adventure is to be admired at a debutantes’ ball, preferably by some future suitor. Amateur dramatics and hair-raising gallops in a pony-andtrap, tedious parlour games, amongst which the slightly more interesting one of ‘match-making’ – these are some of the recurring features of an Austen novel. The resemblances to the Flemish school of genre painting are self-evident. There is no mention of God, no impassioned debate on the great questions of existence; Jane Austen has no tragic, intense conception of the human being. Religion is a purely social phenomenon, far from the important subject of debate it would be for the Victorians. As to her idea of human morphology, ever since Freud she has been accused of not

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giving sex its rightful place at the top of the list of forces that condition human actions. Eros appears to be unknown to her, or at least ignored. It has often been said that her novels are the exact opposite of pornography, in that they do not arouse sexual interest but smother it. There is not one single passionate kiss in all of the six novels.3 Dancing is the nearest thing to eros in her world, and even there she cannot actually describe it, never having experienced it herself. Of late, attempts have been made to demonstrate the presence in her work of a sedate, measured ‘discourse’ on British imperialism and abolitionism, but with all that, her vision remains generally Tory.4 4. Ralph Waldo Emerson asked himself if Jane Austen was overrated, confessing he could not understand why people held her novels in such high esteem. The question still stands today. Perhaps no other author has enjoyed such cult stature and consensus from the man in the street to the scholar. Her cult status is seen in non-stop publication of de-luxe editions of the novels in England and throughout the English-speaking world, reverently edited and richly printed so as to become real works of art, not products for rapid consumption, and exemplifying a reversal of current trends in the market, when books have become, almost by definition, ‘e-books’ and relayed to the public by means of Kindle. In the academic world, Austen is more in demand than Milton and as much as Shakespeare, and the ‘industry’ that has grown up around her is flourishing indeed. A staggering number of compendia, manuals, reading guides, huge books more than 500 pages long, and the work of dozens of collaborators, are dedicated not only to the actual text of the novels, but, more and more, to the ‘context’, and, more specifically, the intersections with other ‘worlds’, like fashion, education, cooking, entertainment, the professions, politics, religion, transport and trade at the turn of the century. Such studies, often with no parts specifically dedicated to the novels themselves, suggest that 3

4

An assertion often made by Praz (cf. for example, SSI, vol. II, 173) but not completely true if taken literally: in Chapter 12 of Sense and Sensibility Willoughby kisses a lock of Marianne’s hair; in Chapter 45 of Emma, Mr Knightley is on the point of kissing the heroine’s hand when, ‘from some fancy or other, he suddenly let it go’. Butler 1975 and 1987 is essential reading on the subject.

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Austen criticism has made little significant progress in years. It is hard to point to any revolutionary critical works published since 1945; every year sees books based on the classic formula of introduction, six chapters, one for each novel, and a conclusion. The procedure can only be that of the running commentary, obliged to emphasize secondary details, establish more or less convincing links with earlier and later readings, and suggest comparisons of various parts of the novels with future anthropological bastions like Freud, Foucault, Bachelard and others. Austen’s plots are traced, contrasts and analogies highlighted, the differences between the various heroines underlined. Above all, at the bottom of it all lies an oldfashioned discussion of characters classified according to the paradigms that the syntagmatic line presents one after the other. Over-blown disagreements between critics boil down to mere quibbling and hair-splitting. Or else we are invited to taste certain pretentious, esoteric soups that turn out to be quite insipid. 5. Not all the female writers that came after her treated Austen kindly: she was criticized sternly by Charlotte Brontë for presenting men and women unmoved by passionate feelings, mere respectable gentlemen and demure gentlewomen. Many saw the drastic restriction of her narrative field as a serious drawback, and Charlotte was joined by Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the negative chorus. Contrary receptions from male writers include comments from such figures of authority as Mark Twain, D. H. Lawrence5 (diametrically opposite to Austen), and in more recent times, Kingsley Amis. It is significant that she was revered and imitated by less ‘inspired’ female writers and by feminized or effeminate males like Henry James and E. M. Forster. James is described as a legitimate descendant of Austen by a character in one of Kipling’s short stories, entitled ‘The Janeites’, which was however read and analysed by Gubar and Gilbert6 in order to exemplify the ‘curious effect’ of Austen on males who were in no way ‘feminized’, but, quite the contrary, manly and virile, like the soldiers of the First World War. For Kipling, the same spirit that animates, symbolically, the characters in

5 6

Cf. Trilling’s discussion, in PGU, vol. 5, 156–7. GGM, 110–11.

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Austen’s world lit the fuse on the cannons that shelled the Germans on the Western Front. He interpreted the Austen cult as being addressed to a symbol of English patriotism. The English, or some English nostalgics, still identify with a writer who holds up to view yellowing photographs of old rituals and conversations on the subject of love but kept strictly within the bounds of decorum, though laced with innocent wit; a writer capable of creating the illusion of the survival of a universe that is orderly, composed, under control, unthreatened by the forces of anarchy; a world in which all share a sense of being part of an organic community, with a range of values in common. Anyone seeking thrills or upheavals or great displays of imagination in Austen’s novels will obviously be disappointed. Except for Mansfield Park, none of them convey a sense of power or intense inspiration. Writers like Forster admitted to a shrewdly blind fanaticism lamenting the end of a bygone era, and the degeneration of the present world, dominated by an inhumane and mechanical civilization. Austen seems to acknowledge that nostalgia is relative, exponential and, therefore, eternal. § 161. Austen II: Gothic vaccination Any account of Austen’s novels must take into consideration their actual date of composition, which is often quite different to the date of publication. However, there is long-standing consensus on their chronological order. Initially called Susan, and already completed by 1797, Northanger Abbey was sold in 1803 to a publisher who failed to print it. The manuscript was bought back by the author in 1816, and appeared, revised, only posthumously in 1817 (1818 on the frontispiece). Composed, therefore, in two distinct periods, it presents ab origine those macrotextual elements which return in her stories, a female protagonist about to enter into society, an ending consecrated by the inevitable marriage; the structural contrast is between the natural and the artificial, spontaneity and affectation, imagination and reason. The construction of the novel revolves around conflicting abstract qualities, though this is not yet reflected in the title, which refers simply to a place. Catherine Morland, the heroine, leaves the family nest, and, after a few wrong steps, manages to come to terms with the reality around her. I have used the word ‘heroine’, but ‘anti-heroine’ would be a more appropriate term: one of the targets of Austen’s irony in this novel is

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the typical late eighteenth-century heroine with her artificial, mannered and fanciful ways. Catherine is ‘simple’, does not like music, and is not very talented, but these ‘non-qualities’ create the heroism of anti-heroism. She is the first of Austen’s young women to break free of her prejudices, as Emma will do in her own way. In Emma, Bath is once again a symbolic locus, where the vacuous Mr Elton goes to seek a wife. He succeeds: his ‘other half ’ is just as shallow and affected as he is. At Bath the ‘anti-heroine’ Catherine, indifferent to the accomplishments of her sex, falls back into line and discovers she needs a suitor: the author’s calm, restrained contestation of traditional roles does not go so far as to deny this necessity. Catherine is capable of keeping her feet on the ground, guided by her infallible natural instinct, and gradually discovers how opportunistic, and ‘unnatural’, her friend, Isabella, is; she rejects the advances of Isabella’s brother – a blundering pest with a thing about horses. She looks for, and finds, her ‘hero’ in the person of the Reverend Henry Tilney. Yet Catherine does make one mistake: she tries to transform literature into life. This is Austen’s other target, which comes under fire in the second part of the book, in which Catherine leaves Bath and is invited to spend some time with the Tilneys at their ‘abbey’ in Northanger. In her The Mysteries of Udolpho, Ann Radcliffe had launched a fashion which was widely imitated; but Austen the novelist refuses to sink to the level of degrading the genre she has chosen to practise: in a page of particularly pungent literary criticism, she suspends the plot, denounces the contempt with which highbrow reviews treat the novel form, and declares the work of the novelist – from a formal, linguistic and psychological point of view – to be ‘serious’ and worthy of praise. It is quite a different matter, however, to filter life through the muslin of literature without the necessary critical analysis and detachment. From now on, in her novels, the motto will be: tell me what you read, or, rather, how you read, and I will tell you who you are. It is perfectly possible that Austen may initially have wanted to clarify her position, and inserted a piece of militant literary criticism, destined to be published in some journal or the other, into a story about a Burney-like debutante, where it sticks out like a sore thumb. The discussion of current literary genres resurfaces at every turn, along the lines of a Fielding, who while writing to amuse and entertain parodied Richardson’s Pamela. Austen often appeals directly to the reader, as does Fielding. In

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fact, Northanger Abbey is an excellent opportunity to revisit the traditional canon of the eighteenth century and make it clash with the one of her day. A good literary education included Shakespeare, Pope, Gray and Thomson, and Catherine has read and memorized many lines from these authors. Then came ‘Monk’ Lewis and, above all, the Radcliffe craze.7 The Burney entrapment is represented by John Thorpe, who, ingenuously or cunningly, creates a false image of her in Tilney, while Catherine is unable to ward off his interference and is caught in the trap.8 She arrives at Northanger having convinced herself that she will find there the world of Ann Radcliffe, only to discover that the reality is more ‘ordinary’, and, above all, more modern than she expected, so that she is disappointed and disoriented: she is looking for mysteries, suspects that they do exist (is Mrs Tilney still alive? Is she a prisoner of her husband? What is in the mysterious casket?),9 but they all seem to just disappear. A ‘ray of common sense’ frees her and rids her of her Gothic fancies. Here are the actual words she uses, in which Austen mingles a little patriotic – and xenophobic – pride: ‘Charming as were all Mrs Radcliffe’s works, and charming even as were the works of all her imitators, it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the Midland counties of England, was to be looked for. Of the

7 8

9

Tilney has read Udolpho as well; Thorpe does not read novels and his contempt for them is uninformed and based on prejudice. Isabella and John Thorpe are the two villains of the plot. Even before leaving Bath, Isabella, who aspires to marry Tilney’s brother, flirts openly with Tilney himself. Thorpe blatantly courts Catherine and, to go to Bristol with her in his coach, he tells her he has seen Tilney walking with a girl, who will turn out to be his sister. Next day, Catherine calls on him in order to explain, but he is not at home for her. Thorpe’s machinations continue: he tells the general that Catherine’s family is poor and that she consequently has no dowry. This episode will be parodied, in turn, in Jane Eyre, when Jane wanders through Thornfield’s Gothic dwelling. In the stormy night, Catherine sees a casket, which she manages, with some difficulty, to open, and finds some manuscripts: she puts out the light, and suddenly hears some sinister noises. Once again, expectations outstrip reality: the manuscripts are lists of linen items. Catherine recovers, although certain ‘Gothic’ objects – a cupboard or a casket, for example – will never fail to send a faint shiver down her spine.

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Alps and Pyrenees, with their pine forests and their vices, they might give a faithful delineation; and Italy, Switzerland, and the south of France might be as fruitful in horrors as they were there represented. Catherine dared not doubt beyond her own country, and even of that, if hard pressed, would have yielded the northern and western extremities. However, in the central part of England there was surely some security for the existence even of a wife not beloved, in the laws of the land, and the manners of the age. Murder was not tolerated, servants were not slaves, and neither poison nor sleeping potions to be procured, like rhubarb, from every druggist. Among the Alps and Pyrenees, perhaps, there were no mixed characters. There, such as were not as spotless as an angel might have the dispositions of a fiend. But in England it was not so; among the English, she believed, in their hearts and habits, there was a general though unequal mixture of good and bad’. The exorcism of the ‘unnatural’ is complete, and Tilney can proudly introduce to his sister her future sister-in-law, ‘open, candid, artless, guileless, with affections strong but simple, forming no pretensions, and knowing no disguise’. 2. The struggle between the Gothic-Romantic and the ReasonJudgement of the Enlightenment is not expressed in two different characters in Northanger Abbey, but co-exists, fights, and is resolved within the same protagonist. In Sense and Sensibility (1811), instead, it is split into the two sisters, Marianne and Elinor. With a kind of Hegelian gambit, Austen perhaps proposes a synthesis and resolution of the struggle.10 Originally conceived as an epistolary novel entitled Marianne and Elinor, in the final version it became a third-person narration in fifty chapters, with no division in ‘parts’, and rapid pace despite the complex plot. The beginning sees the death of a small landowner who leaves two daughters and a widow in their property in Sussex. The deceased man had had, from his first wife, a son, who takes possession of the Norland house (there may be some symbolic significance in the choice of this name, which evokes the north, as does Northanger). The son, urged on by his grasping, selfish wife, forces the widow and her daughters to leave the house and move to 10

It seems clear that the two Austen sisters return as Constance and Sophia in Arnold Bennett’s great novel, The Old Wives’ Tale.

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Devon. A friendship develops between Elinor and Edward Ferrars, the brother of that woman, but never turns into an actual love affair. In their home county of Sussex, and in Devon where they are forced to move, the characters of the two sisters emerge: they differ in just about everything. In Devon, they meet the moody and mysterious Colonel Brandon, who makes advances to Marianne, only to be met with a refusal. Marianne has fallen in love with Willoughby, a huntsman. Both these potential suitors, however, are forced, quite mysteriously, to disappear. In reality, a further opposition is established between vulgar, self-interested characters on the one hand, and generous, romantic ones on the other; practically a contrast between poetry and prose.11 Marianne and Willoughby have in common a love of Scott, Cowper, music, dancing and hunting – a kind of symbolic synthesis of effusive Romanticism. So this novel in particular can be seen as a masked discussion on Gothic as the systole of existence: the two ‘Gothics’, Marianne and Willoughby, love ruined cottages and the Gothic poetry of Radcliffe’s banditti, while Elinor prefers classical architecture. The story proceeds without fuss, following a routine of satirical scenes, but with small or great mysteries ever ready to emerge, almost as if this metronomic society were a time bomb that might explode at any moment. Brandon is rumoured to have an illegitimate daughter, and no one knows why Ferrars is so melancholy and sad. The characters are on the defensive and keep their mouths shut. Halfway through the novel, the situation comes to a head: Elinor forgives Ferrars when she discovers the cause of his melancholy, while in London Marianne is informed that Willoughby has deceived her (he returns her love tokens, including a lock of her hair). It transpires that he has seduced Brandon’s daughter and abandoned her once she got pregnant. Such is the ‘dirty linen’ of this superficially ‘prim’ society. Willoughby has been a kind of Rochester for Marianne, in that he is engaged to Miss Williams, and Marianne is like Jane Eyre on the night before her wedding. Marianne recovers from a symbolic illness thanks to Elinor’s ‘sense’. The happy ending is certain: Elinor and Ferrars can marry, since Edward has been set free by Lucy, and Marianne discovers she loves Colonel Brandon. 11

Anne Elliot in Persuasion advises Captain Benwick, an aficionado of Scott and Byron, to read more prose.

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The secrets hidden in the characters’ past are revealed all at once, in a long volcano-like eruption, as if the historical and fictional subject had been forced until now to keep all this emotional turmoil under control. Similar struggles are not between conceptual categories, but express dilemmas deriving from economic conditioning: the power of parents to impose a marriage partner on their children, and the latter’s refusal to comply, in the name of true feeling. Catherine Morland’s parents are exceptional in not forcing her to marry against her will. 3. Pride and Prejudice (1813) opens with what sounds very much like an anticipation of the beginning of Wuthering Heights, with the wealthy Mr Bingley arriving from the north and renting Netherfield Hall. In reality, as the story progresses, there is no analogy between him and Lockwood, but rather between him and Bingley’s friend, Darcy, a dark, grumpy, rude person, but who – like Brandon of Sense and Sensibility – might hide great humane qualities beneath his crusty exterior. Obviously, Darcy represents pride, and Elizabeth, prejudice, though there is some overlapping. Significantly, Austen herself acknowledged that the novel lacked chiaroscuro. At the same time, it demonstrates the speed with which, in Austen’s novels, a network of human relationships is established: the Bingleys begin to frequent the Bennets; Elizabeth Bennet and Darcy are attracted to each other, though, as usual in Austen, they are soon faced with all sorts of obstacles and hindrances. Elizabeth and Darcy, like Shakespeare’s Benedick and Beatrice, openly nettle and prick each other, yet the impulsive Elizabeth, flouting all decorum, one day gets covered in mud and dirt when she goes to visit, on foot, her sick sister, who is staying with the Bingleys. She spends the night there, thus creating the opportunity for the principal characters to be together and engage in verbal sparring. The format of the novel is spare and essential, and dialogue prevails over third-person narration. The characters are polite and respectful, at least in appearance, but are not above slander and back-biting, and passing scathing judgement on those they do not approve of. At the end of the first quarter of the book, we are introduced to a relative of the Bennets’, Mr Collins, a curate who stands to inherit their house in compliance with the law of entail, and who is ‘sponsored’ by the haughty Catherine de Bourgh. Collins has come to claim Elizabeth’s hand, but she brutally turns her back on him. Austen’s

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narrative skill shines in Mr Bennet’s deadly, deadpan humour12 when he warns his daughter of his and her mother’s reaction were she to accept the proposal, or refuse it. Not for the first time in Austen’s novels, the heroine is faced with a dilemma, or rather, is under blackmail: if she marries Collins, her family will be able to continue to live in their house, but she would be sacrificing herself. Another habitual feature of Austen’s art is the creation of a network of mysteries and misunderstandings that deceive both the other characters and the reader. A new arrival on the scene, a certain Wickham, part of a regiment stationed nearby, whose very name smacks of ‘wickedness’, spreads the rumour that Darcy is a scoundrel who has pocketed money set aside for Wickham by his father. The slander is believed, also because Darcy is generally disliked. The rumour produces two different versions that will be examined in the course of events. In a long interval, Collins proposes to Elizabeth’s best friend, and Jane (there are five Bennet sisters, but the narrative focuses on only two of them, the other three being left in the shade) laments the fact that the arrival of winter has forced the Bingleys to leave for London. This is the lowest point, with no prospect of marriage on the horizon. The mysteries begin to be cleared up when Darcy declares his innocence regarding the rumours spread by Wickham, and states that the latter’s hostility derives from his attempted seduction of Darcy’s sister, Georgiana. This radically changes the idea Elizabeth has formed of Darcy, and induces her to visit his estate at Pemberley, where, in his absence, she meets his sister. Darcy arrives, and is revealed in his true light. The epistemological paradigm is that reality is slippery and even the most cautious character can get things wrong.13 Elizabeth apologizes, but more surprises are to come: Wickham disappears after seducing Lydia, one of Elizabeth’s sisters, who is immediately called back home. The elopement without marriage is caused by the attraction of a fine uniform, and sends ripples of fear through the nervous systems of

12 13

Mr Bennet is an absent father who is given cause to repent of this when Lydia elopes with her lover. Economic advantage is the only objective of ‘poor’ Mrs Bennet. Hume’s framing, referring to the novel’s first title of First Impressions, is discussed by Tanner 1987, 108–10.

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the righteous. The couple of the elopers is recalled home, and shunned, but then departs northwards following Wickham’s regiment. In the meantime, Bingley returns to Netherfield and proposes officially to Jane. The marriage of Darcy and Elizabeth is interrupted in extremis by Lady de Bourgh, who orders Elizabeth to set him free. Obviously, her order is ignored, and the couple stroll off repeating their commitment to one another. § 162. Austen III: ‘Mansfield Park’. A thoughtful diagnosis of modern youth A key novel and one of Austen’s masterpieces, Mansfield Park (1814) is a study of the torture meted out to any woman who dares to claim the right to self-determination, particularly if she is adolescent, and, even more so, if she is alone: it is an ordeal, from which, however, Fanny Price emerges unscathed and victorious. The torture is also inflicted by the pride of at least two characters, Fanny’s two aunts who are, in turn, both torturers and tortured, and end up by being exposed in all their hypocrisy, greed and affectation. What is striking is how the contagion spreads to almost all the surrounding characters in a sudden revival of pessimism. Mansfield Park also features a she-devil, of the kind that Fielding half-heartedly played with,14 but which had never been so perfectly portrayed as here in Mary Crawford. Right from the very beginning, the novel is a pleasure to read, and one feels that Austen never did anything better, though in the parts describing the slow, excruciating torture the pace becomes correspondingly heavy and lumbering, and one wishes she had made it shorter. In a macrosequence, which has all the air of being exceptional, the preparations are described for a play ‘for adults only’ with enormous symbolic overtones. At bottom, Mansfield Park is a statement on the slice of history it occupies, and the state of English society, such as will be found in Dickens, and its verdict is that greed is eroding and destroying the values we should hold most dear. The amazing thing is that this diagnosis is not laboured and underlined, but emerges naturally from the flow of events. This can be considered, in a way, the first of the Victorian serials. In three volumes, 14

§ 124.2.

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it is, together with Emma, the longest and richest of Austen’s novels, and the most precise reading of the state of the union to date, that is, to 1814, not long before the actual birth of the serial novel. Her characters range from old to young, emblematic and always present, but the vantage point is assigned to a teenage girl who is an orphan in spirit but not in fact, and who remains upright and honest despite the corruption around her, like certain Dickensian heroes. The geographical and social landscape is the familiar one of the country house and the vicarage. However, once in a while we are given a fleeting glimpse of slums and poverty that seem to accuse Austen of being blind, and of never having seen such things before. She had actually lived in the very town of Portsmouth, where the Price family ends up, and the father turns to drink, and the other children live in filth. This is, indeed, quite a different England to her native Steventon. For the second time in the Austen canon, the title is a place name and not the name of a character or of two opposing abstract qualities. Mansfield Park is a microcosm, and its name may allude to Langland and Bunyan: ‘the field, or place, of man or men’, but the sarcasm or irony is clear: is it a place of real or false men? 2. If there is any character in which the author has, as it were, mirrored herself, that character is Fanny Price; the identification is pervasive and ‘romantic’. Fanny is a poor relation who has been brought up in the house of her rich aunt, Lady Bertram, where she is looked down on by the other relations and pitied and helped only by her cousin, Edmund. So she has been uprooted and coldly transplanted to Mansfield Park. The first few chapters tell in brief of her life from ten to fifteen years of age. This is the first and only time Austen has focused on this age-bracket, and may be seen as looking ahead to Dickens and Gaskell, also because of the scathing criticism of the insensitivity of the ‘grown-ups’, as represented by her scatter-brained aunt, Lady Bertram, and the other, more perfidious, Aunt Norris. Fanny feels as though she is a package to be moved around at other people’s will; no one wants her and no one cares about her. There is nothing in Austen to equal the intensity and pathos of these first pages, which were to inspire George Eliot in The Mill on the Floss. Gradually, however, the reader becomes aware of the absence of the twist which always comes late in Austen, and, when it comes, is

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relatively mild. The friends of the young Bertrams, Henry and Mary Crawford, do not provide the ‘twist’; for their own amusement, they stage a rather daring play – translated from the German of Kotzebue by Elizabeth Inchbald (if nothing else, this is a useful indication of the tastes of the times). In reality, this is the great turning point, since the rehearsal of the salacious play acts as a release valve for the youngsters’ repressed urges. In this episode, the young people are at a dangerously loose end, with no reference point of authority, since Sir Bertram is in Antigua visiting his plantations (doubly symbolic, in that the ‘corruption’ of the youngsters is directly connected to the wealth deriving from slavery). The play being rehearsed reflects emotional anarchy, too, given the flagrant infidelity in the group of young people. Fanny does not wish to participate in the play, and thus shows she is extraneous to the game of flirting which is part of theatre; but this theatre is also Shakespearean, and a reflection on life, since ‘all the world’s a stage’, and the stage is a world in itself.15 The insertion in a novel of a rehearsal as a microcosm of life is a stroke of genius, and will be found again in Virginia Woolf and in Angela Carter’s The Magic ToyShop. It is no coincidence that Fanny is forced to sit through Edmund’s proposal to her rival, mixing up actor and character. 3. Subsequently, Edmund courts Mary Crawford and does not realize that Fanny is waiting for him; in particular, he is not aware of Mary’s cunning. In this way, the portrayal of Aunt Norris becomes even more negative, as she misses no opportunity to remind Fanny that she is only a poor cousin, or poor grandchild. Sir Thomas Bertram gives a ball to celebrate the ‘possible’ engagement of Fanny to Henry Crawford, or the return of William Price from the navy. There follows a series of pathetic episodes

15

This is more or less what Trilling says at page 163 of the book referred to in n. 5 above. The play in question is called Lovers’ Vows. Not many critics point out that the theatre still bore the stigma assigned by Puritanism, and the effects of three major events: the closing of the theatres in 1642, Collier’s attack of 1697, and the Licensing Act that had put an end to Fielding’s career as a playwright. True or false, there is a suspicion that, before Mansfield Park, Jane Austen may have shown an active interest in Wesleyan evangelicalism (Litz 1965, 114 and 191 n. 5, and Butler 1987, 163–4).

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which are, and are not, a parody of the sentimental genre: the scene of the necklace, in particular, with Mary brutally reminding Fanny that she is only lending it to her and that it is a gift from Henry, and Fanny choosing another given by Edmund and then reflecting that it is better not to hurt Mary. Herein lies the infinite sweetness of the novel, the thrill of reserve, for here, as in Gaskell, the signs are far from clear and are really trampled underfoot. Edmund is ‘deaf ’, and Fanny tries not to show she is suffering because of this spiritual separation. Fortunately Edmund understands that Mary is only interested in wealth and appearance. She becomes a fury, and Fanny trembles as she listens to her outburst. For his part, Henry is the braggart or bounder who uses all his wiles to obtain what he wants. His proposal is rejected by the firm, judicious Fanny, who underneath an appearance of meekness, is always strong and tenacious, never failing to speak her mind when necessary. Fanny also resists pressure from her uncle, who gives Henry permission to renew his courtship. Heroically, she stands strong against Mary’s stratagems, which consist in declaring and denying. Fanny’s visit to her parents after many years is transformed into yet another assault, since marriage to Henry would much improve the prospects of the wretched family, doomed by the drunkard of a father and by third-world hygiene. Henry tries all ways, and eventually runs Fanny to ground in Portsmouth, where the young girl, if it were up to her, would be ashamed of her family. He dons the mask of the good fellow, and goes to church with the family. But not even this works. Edmund blindly swears to Fanny that he can marry none but Mary and adds he is sure Fanny will marry Henry. Salvation lies in the scandal that erupts when it is discovered that Henry has eloped with Maria, Edmund’s sister. The ‘immoral’ antics of the English Romantics, Shelley and Byron, were in the air and seem to be referred to here. Julia, too, the other sister, elopes with her lover. There is no end to the scandal. Back at Mansfield Park, Fanny is forced to take the blame for encouraging the elopement. However, Edmund is enlightened as to Mary’s true nature. There is absolutely no triumph at the end, just a certain sadness at the way happiness – not much of it, to tell the truth – has been won. The villains are given their due, as in all the best plays, and Fanny settles down to married life with the Reverend Edmund Bertram.

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§ 163. Austen IV: ‘Emma’. The masochism of match-making Emma (1816) is Austen’s humorous novel par excellence: ‘light-hearted’ is the term most often used, so that it comes natural to compare it to Mozart, who had recently been composing music of a similar tone. Emma may be defined as such, miraculously, after a few threatened tragedies and an elegy, though in my opinion it ends up by being ‘contrived’, too spasmodic, and one whose plot is too often reopened. The subject of the hardened bachelor or obstinate spinster that ends up by getting married goes back to classical comedy, and was revived during the Renaissance in continental Europe. Emma is indeed a novel with a prolonged theatrical structure, set almost entirely indoors, and organized in a series of visits, meetings, verbal community rituals involving slander and envy, as an expression of the static, complacent bliss of provincial England at the end of the eighteenth century. Or maybe it wisely and humorously papers or plasters over the cracks and faults caused by the building up of hidden tensions. It is, therefore, a variant, or inversion of tendency, because the sorrowing woman, alone and abandoned (who later will re-assert herself and return to being a protagonist) seems to be absent in this novel. An unanswered question is whether there exists in this novel the usual Jane Austen scoundrel, revealed or disguised, or whether he has gone forever. Emma is the most neurotic of Austen’s heroines. She has sworn to remain single and is satisfied by playing a compensatory game – match-making. Obviously, she does not yet know herself completely: she believes she is an arbiter, while, in fact, she is a player. Events are laid out like a game of chess or cards with their faces down. Actions are based on suspicions and deductions that may easily be verified and defused but are not (perhaps this is not possible, given the contradictoriness of the human heart). In such a game Harriet, another orphan (a development of Fanny Price relegated to an instrumental role), is a pawn, or rather, the prize at stake. And the principal players are Emma and the down-toearth Mr Knightley. For Emma, match-making is pure thirst for power in miniature; it is regulated by a rigid code of class distinction: no marriage may entail crossing the class barrier, and yet this very rule may be flouted by the match-maker herself, who has established that Harriet belongs to the aristocratic class, though she knows nothing of her origins. ‘Shrewd’ Emma is ‘presumptuous’ Emma, who does not understand that the young

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vicar, Elton, is not interested in Harriet, though Emma is determined he shall marry her. The problem is parodistically philosophical: Emma has any number of irrefutable proofs, but remains unmoved by the evidence.16 The first denouement takes place in the coach on the way back from the Christmas ball, when Emma is faced with Elton’s declaration of love: in this case, she compensates for the failure of her plan by telling herself that Elton is interested only in her money; for a moment she contemplates giving up her role as marriage intermediary, but then decides to carry on: now that she has lost Elton as a match for Harriet, she sets about to find a substitute. When Elton gets married, Emma panics slightly and, in desperation, chooses as the new suitor for Harriet the foppish Frank Churchill. 2. Miss Fairfax enters halfway through the novel to enliven the languishing plot and to present the social theme of the orphan raised by a friend of Emma’s father, and whose only prospects of employment lie in becoming a governess. With her perturbing beauty and air of mystery, Jane Fairfax is an unusually ‘Romantic’ character for Austen, with, however, a functional role, which is to make Emma feel uneasy and even inferior in her presence. The truth is, Emma realizes that Frank Churchill is courting Jane Fairfax, and, subconsciously, this offends her vanity. Who gave Jane Fairfax the piano? Is there the beginning of a flirt between Jane and Knightly? Might Knightly have sent Jane some apples as a present, and is this a strategy to make Emma jealous, or is it real love? Such are the doubts that torment Emma, and give her no rest. Of course, Emma is her own torturer, while her ‘good side’ is sorry for her rudeness towards the innocuous Miss Bates.17 When the word gets out that Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill are engaged, Emma is forced to find an explanation for Harriet, whom she has twice pushed into a dead end. When Emma discovers she loves Knightly and no one but him, she is once again labouring under self-illusion. Little by little reality cuts her down to size, whittling away at her self-confidence 16 17

In an interlinear comment by the narrator in Chapter 39, Emma is defined as an ‘imaginist’, rather than a linguist, or mathematician, or grammarian. Miss Bates’s garrulity is just a few steps away – for the sudden changes of subject, and the abrupt interruptions of the discourse – from the ‘low’ interior monologue of a century later.

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and self-delusion. When she learns that Harriet, if anything, has her sights on Knightly, she is overcome by a sense of guilt: she accuses herself of vanity, arrogance, blindness; she even goes so far as to say that she would have done better to encourage Harriet to marry Martin, and is sorry about Jane Fairfax. And yet, Emma’s achievement of wisdom has its limits, and she will never bring herself to accept the idea of a ‘mixed’ marriage (already present in Richardson). With some relief Harriet is discovered to be the illegitimate daughter of a shopkeeper – and Emma had believed her to be of noble origin! – while Martin is a small landowner. When Harriet marries Martin, Emma recites her last mea culpa: ‘All that time I was a fool’. § 164. Austen V: ‘Persuasion’ Published posthumously in 1818, Persuasion might seem like a weary re-shuffling of the usual, infallible Austen cards, or even a dismal failure after Mansfield Park and Emma: a rather anonymous, run-of-the-mill recycling of used material, featuring once again a young woman, all alone and surrounded by crass superficiality, who dreams of finding a worthy husband and settling down to an honest married life. In reality, the novel has been judged, by some, to be Austen’s absolute masterpiece with its autumnal feel. To Virginia Woolf it seemed extraordinarily fine and extraordinarily boring. Anne Elliot has been enamoured, before the novel opens, of a certain Captain Wentworth, prevented from marrying him by her family owing to the would-be husband’s lack of fortune. In the present, the family splits up, and Anne goes off to live with a married sister instead of following her father and her other sisters to Bath. As usual in Austen’s novels, there are several additional plotlines-cum-digressions, such as those involving her sister Mary’s sisters-in-law, one of whom appears to have attracted Wentworth’s attention, giving rise to an imagined ménage à trois that torments Anne. A series of clues, however, induce her to think that Wentworth is only toying with the idea of courting the sister-in-law in question. In a passage foreshadowing Gaskell and E. M. Forster, Anne revisits her old house, now rented and, as it were, deconsecrated by the new tenants. For example, she notes that all the mirrors belonging to her vain father have been removed. In Austen’s novels, coincidences will sooner or later crop up: while taking a stroll, Anne happens to bump into her cousin, and the reader is led to think

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that Captain Benwick might possibly be interested in her. But Benwick, too, has no assets. As if out of ideas, and in desperate need of a convenient solution, Austen transfers Anne to Bath, where she has other relatives. Here Anne becomes the embodiment of chronic, hopeless seclusion and of the female Sehnsucht which was soon to become a Victorian cliché. The cousin has recently lost his wife, and Anne naïvely thinks that he is interested in her sister, Elizabeth, rather than herself. In the meantime, her father – in Austen, as in Dickens and Thackeray, family bonds are never a guarantee – falls into the snare of a wily gentlewoman. In Bath a friendship is revived when Anne visits an old school friend, now impoverished and sick. Paradoxically, things start to go better than is usual in Austen, and Anne ends up with two suitors instead of none. Actually, she is looking for the most romantic and disinterested solution as against the most logical and opportunistic, which would save her from losing her property, about to pass to the cousin by virtue of the law of entail. The cousin’s real character and intentions are revealed in a Dickensian moment of recognition: the good-for-nothing wretch is guilty, among other things, of ruining the family of the girl who unmasks him. Like the skilful dramatic author she is, Austen postpones the revelation instead of enlightening the victim at once. The cousin has come to Bath to stop Anne’s father from marrying and having an heir thus frustrating his designs on the property. At the same time, he aims to marry Anne. Once the villain has been exposed, the two ‘Fabian’ lovers, Anne and Wentworth, declare their feeling to each other. Their decision not to marry eight years earlier is not a cause of remorse, as the time was not right; and anyway, Wentworth’s career in the navy has brought him wealth and status, so he can be accepted without scandal into the English social system. In this novel, Austen redresses the pessimism of Mansfield Park. § 165. Austen VI: ‘Juvenilia’ and fragments Jane Austen is the first of a series of major English women authors who were born in a vicarage or parsonage, but that is as far as the similarity goes: there were three Brontë sisters, as against the two Austen girls, Jane and Cassandra, of whom only Jane was a writer. At the age of six, Jane and Cassandra were sent off to school at Oxford, then to Southampton, then Reading. There followed a comfortable family life, partly dedicated

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to the fortunes and careers of their brothers. Jane herself was tall of stature, a great talker and not averse to getting into arguments. She travelled very little, and never went farther than London; nor did she appear much in ‘high society’. She probably fell in love only once – in 1802 – and it came to nothing. Her father encouraged the precocious literary vocation of his daughter, who, as Virginia Woolf noted, was already writing burlesques and adaptations when still in her teens, which she then collected in three volumes, ready to be delivered not to her small family circle but to the world at large. Catherine Morland is the exact opposite of Lady Susan, the cynical, calculating adventuress who gives her name to the epistolary novel of the same name, written in 1793–1794, which already shows signs of cold, aseptic, cutting geometries. Lady Susan is ‘the most accomplished coquette in England’, criticized by everyone, starting with her sister-in-law who, like Richardson’s Pamela in married mode, is the moral guide and guardian of the family. Unlike Lady Susan, which ends too abruptly, The Watsons and Sanditon were abandoned after about fifty pages. The former, begun in 1804 and left unfinished when Austen’s father died, has much in common with Emma – not just the name of the heroine – and indeed with all the other novels by Austen. It is, yet again, an initiation, a debut. Emma Watson, whose mother is dead and whose family is poor, returns, after many years, to the village where she used to live with an aunt. At the ball, frequented by all the important people of the place, we find a repeat of one of the Bath experiences of Northanger Abbey: Emma witnesses the flirting, seduction and spitefulness that are part and parcel of love-jousting; she observes with ironic detachment the gushing and blushing, the vanity and shallowness of the guests involved in the ancient rite. In this case, too, Emma is the custodian of deeply held values, out of tune in a chorus of opportunism and social climbing – her relatives are part of it too; for example, she has no hesitation in rejecting an economically advantageous marriage in favour of one based on love. Thanks to her simplicity and naturalness, she arouses the interest of the most sought-after bachelor, who turns out to be something of a ‘hollow man’. Her final choice will fall on a simple, honest, genuine man of the cloth, much like Tilney in Northanger Abbey. 2. While some critics are of the opinion that The Watsons might have been compared with Austen’s principal novels, there appears to be little

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doubt that the incompletion of Sanditon – her last work before her death, interrupted in March 1817 after two months of writing – is, for many, a grave loss. One thing is sure: judging from the eleven and a half chapters at our disposal, it would have marked a new beginning, or at least a huge change of direction towards a novel of unusually bitter social satire and criticism. Its specific target appears to be the new, chaotic ‘industry’ of bathing holidays at the beginning of the nineteenth century, which threatened to create other places like Bath; in reality what she is criticizing is ‘unnaturalness’ itself. The characters are once again divided into those who follow ‘imagination’ and those whose guide is ‘common sense’. In the absence of a real plot, the fragment relies on a series of rapid, biting satirical portraits, starting with that of the founder of Sanditon, the latest addition to the galaxy of British bathing resorts, an earthly paradise specifically built for modern man, but unfortunately still a desert. The moral viewpoint is provided by a young woman who has been sent to the resort to report on the wonderful organization but who will end up by denouncing the aberrant behaviour of the people involved. It is no coincidence that what characters read becomes once again an infallible indication of what kind of people they are: the Gothic craze of Northanger Abbey has been and gone; the suitor of this girl (who wisely ditches him pretty quickly) ‘lives’ the fashionable literature of the day – Titanism, the sublime, and the Romantic idealism of Byron’s early works. § 166. Edgeworth In her day, Maria Edgeworth1 (1768–1849) was read and appreciated in the wake of the words of praise bestowed on her by Scott, who gallantly admitted in the preface to Waverley that he had drawn inspiration and encouragement for his Scottish novels from her stories of Irish life, although the historical novel proper was his own particular invention. Along with John Galt, and more than Galt, Edgeworth was considered

1

The standard edition of the prose works is still the one in 18 volumes, London 1832; the standard biography is M. Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography, London 1972; the correspondence is edited by C. Colvin, Oxford 1971.

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by contemporaries the greatest writer to appear in forty, or at least twenty years, which had been lean as far as novelists were concerned – in other words, between 1771, the date of Humphry Clinker, or the early 1790s with Radcliffe’s Gothic novels, and the first works of Scott and Austen – with the partial exception of Fanny Burney, Godwin and Mary Shelley. She was held in high esteem not only by Scott but by Byron too, and indirect proof of her popularity is that her novels are referred to in Jane Austen’s works as being popular among educated English readers. Her reputation remained high in succeeding decades, and other words of appreciation came from Ruskin, Thackeray and Macaulay, as well as from beyond the sea. For example, she was taken note of by Madame de Staël, and Turgenev wrote that conditions in Russia were similar in the early nineteenth century, with an idle, hedonistic aristocracy that neglected and exploited a longsuffering peasantry. By the end of the century, however, Maria Edgeworth was known exclusively as the author of fairy-tales, and, at the beginning of the twentieth century, she had been lost sight of, mentioned in textbooks only as an unfulfilled talent, someone incapable of handling complex plots, and whose dialogues were stilted and unnatural, as befitted a kind of writing aimed at teaching and preaching. For reasons too familiar to need repeating, today she is being rediscovered and even being talked of as the greatest female novelist between the two centuries and, after Austen, in the first twenty years of the nineteenth. This is because she has been sponsored by two increasingly influential critical lobbies, the postcolonialists, who revalue marginal phenomena up until then neglected, and gender or feminist criticism. Edgeworth’s Irish novels – obviously the result of direct, unmediated experience – are the first serious attempt to describe the social and political situation of Ireland after the much exploited Stage Irishman.2 As a very young woman, Edgeworth, an illuminated Protestant, had fallen under the spell of Rousseau and the French radical and Jacobin thinkers (this revolutionary ardour was dampened and extinguished after 2

Lady Morgan, née Sydney Owenson (1776–1859), is another Irish novelist who has just been ‘rediscovered’ (cf. DEA, 90–1 and 97–9), immersed in the Celtic humus with its symbols, simulacra, talismans – in short, everything that Edgeworth shrank from.

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the unsuccessful uprising of Wolfe Tone in 1798).3 Later she became a resigned Independent, sympathizing with Catholics, but convinced that English supremacy was necessary, a belief modelled on Spenser’s Veue. The English, however, needed to change and reform their policies in order to bring about the peaceful co-existence of the population of the island. In reality, recent criticism has seen in Edgeworth a clear case of a crisis of identity already present in the very label of ‘Anglo-Irish’, thus finding in her novels a series of open, unresolved situations and dilemmas. The feminist perspective has included Edgeworth in the category of women writers subjected to patriarchy, pointing to the episode of the wife, segregated for seven years by one of the owners of Castle Rackrent in the novel of the same name, and to the fact that this was one of the few works written by Edgeworth unbeknown to her father, thus constituting an act of great daring and courage. An objective historian should go back to Edgeworth and evaluate her contribution to the launching of such subgenres as the feuilleton, the sensation novel, the novel of manners, the ‘silver fork’ novel, as well as for the use of the internal narrator, whilst recognizing that the results are not superlative, and that she remains practically unknown outside academic circles. 2. Richard Lovell Edgeworth, a rich Irishman, who had four wives and a total of twenty-two children, was a versatile, enthusiastic dilettante with a wide network of friends and contacts in the fields of science and pedagogy. He was a strict, authoritarian father: his daughter’s education excluded altogether the fundamentals of humanae litterae and concentrated on more practical subjects like political economy, social science, and pedagogy. Born not far from Oxford, the future novelist spent almost her whole life, after the age of fifteen, on her father’s estate in Ireland, an estate that had belonged to a Catholic family in the early seventeenth century, subsequently evicted. Following her father’s dispositions, she managed the estate in the capacity of secretary and book-keeper. With the one exception 3

In 1782, the Parliament in Dublin had obtained legislative independence, but this neue Kurs was compromised by the rebellion, in 1798, of Irish peasants and Protestant smallholders: the result was the Act of Union in 1800, deplored by Byron in Parliament with a striking metaphor.

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mentioned above, her father strictly supervised what his daughter wrote. It must be said, though, that he did much to encourage her. Recent editors have tended to publish her novels without the corrections and revisions provided by her father. Together they wrote a treatise on education, and Maria’s first work was a pamphlet in favour of women’s education. Of the three most important Irish novels, the short, annalistic Castle Reckrent (1800) is not only the first regional novel in English, but anticipates by a good twenty years Galt’s Annals, particularly The Entail. The four owners of Rackrent – mad, outrageous characters given to pleasure and exhibitionism – inaugurate a type of aristocracy caught up in an irreversible spiral of self-destruction. The novel also represents one of the first instances of the use of a sophisticated internal narrator, a stratagem never again to be used by Edgeworth. The narrating voice belongs to the old retainer, a detached, but also complicit witness, loyal, in spite of all, to his masters. The first interpretative conflict derives from the notes on various subjects – race and language, for example, some of them involuntarily parodic and pedantic – added by the author, who pretends to have heard the story from the lips of those involved, and attempts to transcribe the account in the vernacular. The Bakhtinians have had a field day dissecting a text in which an internal narrator narrates from his own point of view but is relativized by the narrator on the frontispiece, thus creating a panorama of vague, variegated perspectives, which might be the death-knell of ascendancy, replaced by a new middle class, or, despite the declared intentions, the denunciation of an irresponsible aristocracy.4 3. Edgeworth was always to be undecided as regards the best policy for Ireland, and Ennui (1809) is pessimistic on the subject of the return of absent landlords. She resumed her support of English rule in Ormond (1817), the last of the Irish novels. In between the two we find The Absentee (1812). During a visit to Ireland, the hero, Lord Colambre, discovers that one of his father’s stewards has been dismissed for not squeezing higher rents from the tenants (rather like the good Mr Pancks in Dickens’s Little Dorrit); 4

The various suggestions are examined in DEA, 92. It should be remembered that Rackrent as a property ends up in the hands of the narrator’s son, formally disappproved of by his father.

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another of the family’s estates is flourishing while its workers live in abject poverty. He returns to England and urges the exploiting class, including his parents, to manage better the estates they possess, instead of bleeding them dry and pocketing all the profits. This happens, and a utopia is born. Originally meant for the theatre, the novel bristles with fast-moving, witty dialogue. Lady Clonbrony is a brilliant, almost Dickensian caricature of a high-born lady with impeccable manners, who ruins everything when she opens her mouth and out comes her broad Irish brogue; but her son, Lord Colambre, the author’s classic mouthpiece, does not ring true as he mouths his earnest perorations. In the title, ‘absentee’ is in the singular, but might, indeed, should be in the plural and refer to both of Colambre’s parents: the lady is ‘absent’ from her ethnic and national identity, and she would like to erase this supposed stain; Colambre himself is absent and his story becomes that of ‘the return of the native’. But rather than to Hardy, the resemblance here is to a theme that appears at least twice in Scott: the hero in disguise who discovers the things that bind him to his ancestral land. This applies especially to Bertram in Guy Mannering: both heroes have two names, and Colambre returns to a place he last saw when he was six. The world of this amateurish belle époque looks ahead to Disraeli’s ‘silver fork’ and Regency novels; Grace and Colambre form the classic pair of pure people in a society of fakes, as much later in Wilde’s plays. 4. Belinda (1801), too, the most ambitious of Edgeworth’s ‘English’ novels, presents a pre-Wildean formula. Into a dissipated, debauched world are thrust several semi-corrupt characters in whom the flame of virtue is not quite dead (they straddle the line that separates them from vice) and others that are decidedly pure, who, with a coup de théâtre, secure their values from loss and degradation. The plot is too obvious and linear in its movement to be really interesting, and the heroine herself – a debutante who might recall, contrastively, the protagonist of The Rape of the Lock,5 and who resembles Fanny Burney’s leading ladies – is, in fact less of a protagonist than Lady Delacour, the melodramatic portrait of a neurotic, hurting woman, who believes, mistakenly, that she has terminal breast

5

§ 75.3.

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cancer, and suspects her husband of having a relationship with Belinda. Feeling she is about to breathe her last, she forgives her ‘rival’ and then recovers from her illness. The male characters all come in for criticism: Lady Delacour’s husband is a fool, though a likeable one; Belinda’s suitor, Hervey, is always getting into scrapes. At one point he is about to marry some ‘wild woman of the woods’ called Virginia, and just pulls out of it in time.6 The story of this appropriately named Virginia is a novel within a novel, and a parodic revisitation of Rousseau’s noble savage, as well as the kind of surreal illuminations that recall Meredith, of all writers. An Ara parrot is taken to a pet shop to be sold because it makes too much noise. In the shop, the heroine meets a man. They begin a relationship, and become engaged, but at the last minute she finds out about her fiancé’s shady past as a gambler, so the marriage is called off. To make up for it, a black servant marries a white woman. § 167. Galt A frequent error in historical evaluation has been to classify John Galt (1779–1839) as a forerunner or imitator of Walter Scott, based on the fact that Galt was Scottish, his first story was published thanks to the encouragement of his famous fellow-countryman, his characters speak in an albeit not extreme form of Scots, and that Galt actually wrote a few indifferent historical novels towards the end of his career. With all that, it is true that Galt made some small contribution to the vindication of the novel as a literary form at the beginning of the nineteenth century; on a smaller scale, he even stands out in the context of Scottish literature, and, with Scott, created a market for Scottish facts, scenery and characters that, after Waverley, turned into a craze. For this reason he was not only admired by two Scotsmen or half-Scotsmen like Carlyle and Byron, but hailed by the neutral Coleridge. The anticipatory variant of the Scottish novel lies in the elimination of sentimentalism in favour of realism and sketches, so

6

The biography of Edgeworth’s father tells the curious story of a certain Thomas Day, who raised an orphan girl whom he did not, however, marry, since he was infatuated with the woman who was to become Maria Edgeworth’s third step-mother.

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that Galt is in opposition not only to a fellow Scot like Mackenzie but also to those latent tendencies that will surface in the ‘kailyard school’ of Barrie and his followers. Born on the west coast of Scotland, he was for some time an employee of the customs office and of various commercial concerns of the area. The first of his many journeys took him to London, where he engaged in a number of reckless commercial enterprises, while studying law in his spare time. Ever a dynamic man, he made the acquaintance of Byron during a crossing from Gibraltar to Malta (he was later to write a much-praised biography of the poet). In 1829, he was sent as a functionary of the Canada Company to that country to carry out surveys and land measurements. Galt decided to become a full-time writer relatively late in life, and mainly because he needed money to pay off his many debts. For this reason, much of his work, which covers every conceivable literary genre, is of mediocre quality, only his strictly ‘creative’ writings being worth critical attention. His ‘novels’ – the term is used loosely, as in the case of Peacock – were all published between 1821 and 1832; two or three of them have been resuscitated and are still in print. We might speak of a revival among Scottish readers. All, except one, are wanting on a technical plane, and, as Galt himself realized, there is very little in the way of plot: all we are given is a study of idiosyncratic characters and a record of ‘the signs of the times’, à la Carlyle, which show evident change in the limited environment of the Scottish provinces. This is the beginning of that typical Victorian and Edwardian phenomenon, the provincial saga, cycles of novels, or single ones – Barset, Carlingford, Middlemarch – imaginary names to denote tangible realities, where the events of everyday life are ‘heroicized’ or turned to mock heroic. Galt often resorts to the well-known ploy of the rediscovered manuscript in order to let the protagonist speak directly, and thus recount events in his own words, rather like a modern historian who covers a vast period of time, picking out facts and happenings from his vantage point. Galt stands on the shoulders of Defoe, with his autobiographies and biographies, completely invented or based on actual happenings: but Defoe is more objective and even humdrum, while Galt is lively and effervescent, like Smollett, and his are, above all, voice tests and exploits with idiolects. Galt the prose-writer is a forerunner of Browning and his dramatic monologues, since there is no identification between

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author and orator, but a subtle, vigilant controlled objectivization. Only Browning is capable of assuming such diametrically different identities as the Covenanter in Ringan Gilhaize (1823) and the complacent, rich, crass Tory in The Member (1832), or the radical who, in the novel of the same name (1832), conceals his opportunism. The Reverend Balwhidder, in the first sketch of Annals of the Parish (1821), was meant as a Scottish version of Goldsmith’s vicar of Wakefield: as a minister of the Church, he resembles him in conscientiousness, goodness, and involuntary obtuseness. Galt lays out in fifty chapters fifty years (up to 1810) in the life of an out-of-the-way but lively Scottish village – events and characters that raise a smile, or draw a tear, or sometimes have you shaking with laughter. The buffoonery is kept under control, the humour is never vulgar, and the story flows so smoothly and clearly as to become, in the end, quite dull. The Ayrshire Legatees,1 an epistolary novel published in 1821, is obviously influenced by Smollett’s Humphry Clinker, but lacks its zest and flavour.2 The Provost (1822) portrays a crafty but not really wicked character in a pseudo-Machiavellian opportunist who pushes his way to the top in the very village where Galt was born. He is the most successful product of Galt’s ventriloquism: a master of political cant, full of long, contorted sentences and endless, often hilarious circumlocutions that satirize bureaucratic and legal doublespeak; ‘hard terms’ and technical expressions rub shoulders with down-to-earth, colloquial language. One chapter begins: ‘Nothing very material […] happened in the town’, and this is the risk and limit of the story – it becomes the exact opposite of the sensation novel. In The Entail3 (1823) Galt dares to write a real, full-length novel, using the technique of the omniscient narrator. So far, he had been criticized for his

1

2 3

The Scottish family of the pastor goes to London to take possession of an inheritance, and writes back letters full of comments on facts and curiosities, gossip and rumours in the capital. The adressees in turn comment on the letters they receive, expressing their surprise, wonder or condemnation, depending on the original input. Reverend Pringle’s wife blatantly imitates the linguistic howlers of Smollett’s Tabitha Bramble. For Trollope’s frequent use of the term, indicating the restriction of inheritance to male heirs, cf. Volume 5, § 87.2 and n. 42.

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flimsy plots, but here he goes to the opposite extreme and turns out a story that is excessively complicated and weighed down by abstruse, incomprehensible legal niceties. But, for all that, it is still his most powerful novel: none of his other characters comes near Claud Walkinshaw with his dark, self-destructive obsession with wealth, which leads him to trample on all other values and ennobling feelings, only to repent too late and too bitterly. Its mark is that of inexorable fate, of crime and punishment rooted in dour Scottish Calvinistic determinism (Hogg’s Justified Sinner is more or less contemporary), with clear anticipations, widely noticed by critics, of a leitmotif found repeated much later in Balzac, Verga, and all the way down to Thomas Mann and Galsworthy. § 168. Other late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century novelists Statistics show clearly that the category of ‘minor fiction’ in the period 1770–1814 is largely dominated by women, who emerge from the wings of Scotland and Ireland (for the moment, Wales is absent) to take their place on the stage of the British novel. They did not form an organized group, but worked in relative isolation, and yet were linked by common interests and concerns, like Rousseau’s philosophy of education as expounded in Émile – the denunciation of prejudices and taboos, and the sexual enslavement of young women of a marriageable age, and a timid belief in the possibility of revolution. The novel ends up by being more ‘lesson’ than ‘leisure’. The list of novelists of the late eighteenth century and after, or of single novels once popular and since forgotten, is too long for all of them to be mentioned here. Susan Ferrier (1782–1854), the daughter of an Edinburgh lawyer (a friend of Scott’s, who greatly admired her), and aunt of a famous nineteenth-century Scottish philosopher with the same surname, is remembered for the soubriquet she was given – ‘the Scottish Jane Austen’. She had none of the affectations of ‘bluestockings’, openly declared her dislike of plots based on terror, sensation and blood and her predilection for stories that are meticulous in the smallest details. Her three novels, published between 1818 and 1831, and all with abstract nouns as titles – marriage, inheritance, destiny – were inspired by an explicit need to prevent and dissuade. The two daughters in Marriage exemplify the folly of an imprudent marriage and, on the contrary, the happiness

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resulting from a careful choice of husband. The novel also contrasts the rigid morality of Scotland with the easy-going customs of the English capital. Unfortunately, the contrast never emerges from the facts narrated, but is conveyed by the frequent intrusion of the narrating voice. Nothing happens to change intentions in The Inheritance. Gertrude faces the choice between two suitors, and for her own good chooses the virtuous one, but then discovers that she has no inheritance, as she and others had thought. This discovery, which is part of the repertoire of melodramatic romance, contradicts in a way the novelist’s aesthetic premises. Her third novel, too, Destiny, resorts to the use of Gothic paraphernalia such as kidnapping, seduction, intrigue and shipwrecks. As in Scott, there are many secondary comic characters belonging to the Scottish repertoire, humorous, eccentric scenes full of dialogues in which every second sentence contains a joke or witticism. As in Scott, in the long run they begin to pall. 2. The plot of A Simple Story1 (1791) by Elizabeth Inchbald (1753– 1821) is not, at first sight, very promising: a former Roman Catholic priest, Dorriforth,2 hears a confession in which he learns that his wife has been unfaithful to him. After her death, his only consolation has been their daughter. In fact, the novelist succeeds in creating a hot-house atmosphere recalling the excitement of Miss Milner, his future wife, when she is placed in the care of the young priest, the latter’s gradual sexual awakening and the uncontrollable consequences. Inchbald’s novel has recently enjoyed a revival of interest,3 and is the first of a type based on the figure of a Catholic priest and his struggle with his sexuality, a subgenre that stretches from Victorians like Froude and Wilkie Collins right up to Graham Greene. 1

2

3

This a chiastic variation of the story of Inchbald herself, a friend of Godwin’s, who preferred Mary Wollstonecraft to her. She then married the actor, J. P. Kemble, like her a Catholic, who was intended for the priesthood, but chose the stage instead. Kemble died before Inchbald, whereas in the novel the heroine dies, leaving the former priest a widower. A controversial point, indeed a huge error in Canon Law, is found in the second chapter of the second volume of this four-volume novel, where it seems that Dorriforth goes to Rome after the death of his cousin, Lord Elmwood, to obtain suspension from the priesthood so that ‘this Earldom should continue in a Catholic family’. Cf. a new edition, Oxford 1987.

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Miss Milner herself is an exemplification of female sexual incontinence and its irresistible determinism, something that Inchbald herself experienced personally, much like Charlotte Brontë after her.4 In the second part of the novel, their daughter, Matilda, is the Gothic-style prisoner of a tyrannical father as well as the living expiation of her mother’s sin. Inchbald’s other novel, Nature and Art (1796), too, is ‘educational’: its protagonists are two fathers that impart two different kinds of education to their children, bringing to light the damage done by current pedagogic methods. The warning to women not to fall for the first seducer that comes along is taken from a play by the German, Kotzebue, mentioned above in connection with Austen’s Mansfield Park, in which one of his works is staged:5 the seduced woman confesses all to her son, who meets his father and robs him; he is arrested, and reveals his identity, thus inducing his father to marry his mother. 3. Charlotte Smith (1749–1806), left alone to bring up her eight children when her husband was sent to debtors’ prison, became a kind of literary machine, churning out an endless series of novels, which sold well and received positive reviews, but were then panned by the successive generation of critics, leading to her being left out of textbooks and consigned to oblivion – at least, until today. She was basted for ignoring the dictates of good taste and literary decorum: she had, they said, no sense of construction, even though she possessed an unfailing instinct for linking events in a meaningful chain; her characters were simplifications involved in the well-worn story of virtue under siege. She liked happy endings. At present, there is a renewal of critical attention not only for her novels but also for her poetry, confirming the ‘voices in the desert’ of a few critics of the past,6 who were enthusiastic about her prose style, her skill in representing conflictuality between characters, and in the descriptions of nature (not separate, tacked-on pictures, but

4 5 6

As a widow in a prevalently male profession, Inchbald was forced, in London, to resort to all kinds of stratagems, and tread very carefully to avoid scandals and rumours (some of them true) of promiscuousness. § 162.2. Compare the differing points of view of Allen and Renwick, respectively in AEN, 97, and REL, 67–70.

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a kind of objective correlative), that stand out for a striking use of metaphor. These are all elements that, if not pre-modernist, are at least innovatory, so that to call her simply ‘a disciple of Mrs Radcliffe’ is to do her an injustice. In The Old Manor House (1793), her most important novel, the ‘old manor’ is haunted by ghosts who turn out to be smugglers going about their business; the hero leaves for America where he fights against the colonists, but, in the end, does not know which army is really on the side of freedom. A desire for freedom was part of the feminist agenda, but, after expressing somewhat timid support for the ideals of the French Revolution, Smith changed her mind, and in her long poem, The Emigrants, which her most recent editor has called the greatest of its kind between The Task and the first Prelude, she expatiates on the sufferings of the nobility and clergy after the fall of the monarchy in France. As a poet, Smith is just as innovative, and anticipates the intimistic, melancholy vein of the Romantics before nature. The collection of ‘elegiac sonnets’ of 1785 led to a return to popularity, before Bowles, of a metrical form practically abandoned since Shakespeare and Milton, a merit Coleridge did not forget. 4. Of the six novels by Robert Bage (1720–1801), a Quaker turned atheist (like Godwin) who came close to being guillotined during the Terror, and a distant inspirer of Byron and Shelley, Hermsprong (1796) is yet another defence of Rousseau’s theory of the harm done to the child by civilization and organized religion. The hero, brought up by a tribe of American Indians, arrives in London and shocks and scandalizes the cultural circles and public opinion with his audacious ideas on progress and the rights of women, and his criticism of the class system, and talks a lord into letting him marry his daughter. In extremis the radical author reaches a compromise and engineers a happy ending: Hermsprong is revealed as the lord’s nephew and, therefore, his legitimate heir. 5. Frederick Marryat (1792–1848), a naval officer who had already written an adventure story in 1829, wrote many more tales of the sea when he left active duty. His children’s books are comparable in popularity to those of Emilio Salgari in Italy fifty years later. He was no expert in plot construction, and his works are full of stylistic flaws, but his characters are lifelike, and one adventure follows another in breathless succession. He has the merit of having kindled in Conrad his passion for the sea.

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§ 169. Paine Thomas Paine (1737–1809) had a political belief, or, at least, he formulated a series of ideological propositions so extreme as to place him at odds with almost all of the revolutionary movements of the late eighteenth century that he joined or tried to join. In the end he was usually thrown out for excessive radicalism. The son of a Quaker, self-taught, with a passion for science, he was employed in the Excise Office in Norfolk, where, on several occasions, he was dismissed and hired again. When he was no longer a young man, he was introduced, in London, to Benjamin Franklin, who encouraged him to emigrate to America. He left for Pennsylvania in 1774 and there began distributing propaganda in favour of independence and radical reform, in the form of a newspaper: he was the inspiration and ideologue behind the federal Convention. He published a work with the eloquent title of Common Sense (1776), attacking the British monarchy and urging the immediate independence of the American colonies. His address to the republican troops was read in public by Washington. On his return to England, he wrote, as an answer to Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution, The Rights of Man in two parts, in 1791 and 1792, making a subtle distinction between the practice and the historical principle of despotism. This propaganda was, in part, responsible for the widespread psychosis that French troops were about to cross the Channel. Paine decided to escape to France (there is no proof of the suggestion that he was warned by Blake), where he was elected to the Convention, and consulted as an authority for the wording of the constitution. Englishman that he was, despite everything, he recommended exile for the king rather than death, arousing the suspicions of Robespierre, who had him imprisoned. Exceptionally for the time, Paine donned the robes of moderation in conjuring the people not to forget the dictates of morality, humanity, and even ‘theology’. However, he scored an own-goal with his second most famous work, The Age of Reason (1794–1796), in which he argued in favour of deism, and voiced openly atheistic and ante litteram Marxist opinions on revealed religion and the credibility of the Scriptures. That The Age of Reason is groundbreaking is proved by the successive flood of books on the historical foundations of the Bible that were to be turned out by the Victorians, fuelled by German biblical scholarship. The support given by

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Paine to measures proposed and introduced only many years later, such as progressive income tax and old-age pensions, is a demonstration of the farsightedness of this great political thinker. His efforts were unsuccessful at the time, but he has since been recognized as planting the seed of the First Reform Bill. At bottom, he was a strict, Enlightenment reformist whose guiding principles were reason, tolerance, nature and order. The English are still in no doubt about the supposed dispute between Burke and Paine, the latter immediately accused of being abstract and simplistic, and, on a stylistic plane, of being largely inferior to Burke – vulgar, down-to-earth, concrete, with none of the expository finesse and rhetorical power of his rival. In England, his works were even burnt in public, as was Froude’s The Nemesis of Faith soon after. In America, too, where he returned in 1802, he was given a cool reception because of an open letter in which he had denounced the conservative, pro-British turn taken by American politics, and, less explicitly, his resentment at having been left to his fate during his imprisonment in France. Quite rightly, his body was brought back to England by Cobbett, his only, but wiser follower. § 170. Godwin* William Godwin (1756–1836) was a gathering point for the new engaged intelligentsia, in terms both of direct family relationships and of the influence he had over other writers and thinkers. Three figures, two of them hugely important, owe their physical existence and intellectual prowess to him – four, if we include Godwin’s life partner, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Their union gave birth to Mary, who became Mary Shelley in 1816; a more tenuous trait d’union exists with Byron in the person of Jane Claire Clairmont, Godwin’s daughter from his second wife, and mother to a daughter by the author of Don Juan. Godwin, the coordinator of radical and anarchist thinking for fifteen years from 1785, was a beacon for Coleridge and Wordsworth during their brief infatuation with the *

Novels and memoirs ed. M. Philp, 8 vols, London 1992. D. Locke, A Fantasy of Reason: The Life and Thought of William Godwin, London 1980; B. J. Tysdahl, William Godwin as Novelist, London 1981; P. H. Marshall, William Godwin, New Haven, CT 1984; M. Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice, London 1986.

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French Revolution. Other young poets who were not part of the Hunt circle frequented his house because it was full of his pretty daughters and stepdaughters ready to be won in the name of the philosopher’s teaching against marriage and in favour of free love (at least, at the beginning of his career). In a public trial, Godwin defended twelve of his disciples for having professed his ideals as argued and formalized in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), on account of which the author risked prosecution, only avoided, so the rumour goes, because the book was said to be too abstruse and expensive to have any wide appeal or impact on the public. Many years later, in 1825, Hazlitt declared that no other book had had such a such a profound influence on English political thought. Godwin’s basic axiom is the perpetual perfectibility of man, whose aim is happiness and peaceful coexistence without the need for laws; if actions are founded only on reason, then, in this Enlightenment version of Utopia, ‘truth will always triumph over error’. According to modern Italian categorization, Godwin would be classed as ‘anti-political’. Familiarity with the work of the scientist, Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) and the oratory of the political agitator, Richard Price (1723–1791), contributed to his becoming an atheist who believed that religion kept man in chains (before that, he had been a Nonconformist minister). In London, where he settled in 1783, he wrote for a living, in a wide range of genres, from anonymous textbooks of history, to a biography of Chaucer, a few plays that attracted the attention of Lamb,1 children’s stories (published under a pseudonym) and a dozen novels. It was bitterly ironic that Godwin, who had invoked the ‘euthanasia of governments’, was forced to accept a pension in 1825 from the current administration. Godwin is remembered, basically, for two closely related works: the Enquiry mentioned above, and the novel Caleb Williams,2

1 2

Now included in The Plays of  William Godwin, ed. D. O’Shaughnessy, London 2010. A common Welsh surname, but an unusual first name, carefully chosen for a country lad who becomes the personal assistant of a man of wealth. Caleb is presented as intelligent but assertive and stubborn, though always respectful. In the Bible, he is one of the secret envoys that Moses sends to Israel before the Exodus, and, most importantly, he is the only one, apart from Joshua, who makes it to the promised land.

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which is a fictional version of the former (in one of his essays, he wrote that fiction is often ‘more real’ to readers than bare facts). 2. Classified as a didactic novel, Caleb Williams (1794), stands out as unique in the panorama of late eighteenth-century fiction. It would be more precise to define it a political and ideological novel of protest. Its intention is to denounce the administration of justice of the time, which favoured the wealthy and punished the lower classes, often without proof of guilt; it also targets the horrors of prison life. At the same time it is an optimistic celebration of the victory of truth, because Caleb, the secretary, manages in the end to make the wealthy squire, Falkland, confess to the murder he has committed. Any text that studies the relation between power and the disadvantages of the lower classes, and calls up visions of the Panopticon, ends up by confirming and documenting Foucault’s theories of surveillance and punishment. But there is no doubt that Godwin’s first point of reference were novels of sequestration and imprisonment – particularly in the psychological dimension – and especially the relentless observation and suspense of Richardson’s epistolary novels. The theme of persecution is repeated and varied in Godwin, with continuous reverses and actantial alternations of persecutor and victim, with Falkland the persecutor of Caleb becoming the victim of Caleb’s persecution, and vice versa. A more distant source for Falkland is the mental torture produced by an unconfessed, secret crime: he harks back to Macbeth and his having ‘murdered sleep’;3 but, most of all, Caleb Williams looks towards the future and the works of Poe and Graham Greene. It is not just a ‘political’ novel, but contains metaphysical, existentialist and religious aspects, and is akin to the Calvinist literature of the ‘double’ – Hogg, Stevenson, Hawthorne and especially Dostoevsky and Kafka. Caleb is a man born free, healthy, enterprising and endowed with curiosity, and yet, as in Kafka, inexplicably persecuted and found guilty. He rightly questions a religion based on punishment, and believes, instead, that God forgives those who repent: ‘God, we are told, judges of men by

3

As a confirmation of the perhaps even subliminal effect of this association, ‘the milk of human kindness’ is said to be absent in a hideous old woman in whose house Caleb repairs in his flight.

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what they are at the period of arraignment, and whatever be their crimes, if they have seen and abjured the folly of those crimes, receives them to favour. However, the institutions of countries that profess to worship this God admit no such distinctions. They leave no room for amendment, and seem to have a brutal delight in confounding the demerits of offenders. It signifies not what is the character of the individual at the hour of trial. How changed, how spotless, and how useful, avails him nothing. If they discover at the distance of fourteen or of forty years an action for which the law ordains that his life shall be the forfeit, though the interval should have been spent with the purity of a saint and the devotedness of a patriot, they disdain to enquire into it’. 3. Godwin maintained that the novel was written starting from the end, which would explain why the quality of writing declines as it goes on, so that the third third is longer and more muddled than the other two. The ideological objective, too, changes. Right from the beginning, the touch and forma mentis of the philosopher is evident in the three, perfectly balanced parts, and in the meticulous, methodical first-person narrative, as well as the precise terminology, and the attention to details in the descriptions. The minor characters are brought to life thanks to the sparing use of regional dialect. Somewhat straining the demands of verisimilitude, Godwin endows his ‘philosophical’ hero with a phenomenological approach deriving, one supposes, from the extensive reading that drew Falkland’s attention to him. The prelude of the young lord’s amatory adventures in Italy, as recounted to Caleb by the steward, may appear melodramatic and mannered, but its function is to explain the reason for the struggle between two characters who are pushed further and further apart as each attempts to enhance his economic, political, and, especially, psychological power over the other. The young Falkland had fallen in love with an Italian countess, who was also being courted by an impulsive Italian: but here too, the persecutor – who tries to impose his will – is in fact the victim, and Falkland succeeds in inducing his rival to desist and accept defeat. In the following central episode, too, one would expect that Tyrrel, frustrated by Falkland’s success and prestige, would sooner or later explode and murder his rival; what happens is the very opposite. Tyrrel, a type of Mr B in Richardson, faced with the budding love affair between Falkland and his cousin, Emily, orders her

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to marry a boorish local; she refuses, and dies. Falkland, attacked by Tyrrel, fights back and kills him, but manages to shift the blame onto an innocent man, who is sentenced to death in his place. Weighed down by guilt, he begins to show signs of mental instability; Caleb sees this and keeps him under constant observation; officially, he is an ‘underling’, but he already has great psychological leverage over his master, and engages in a relentless war of attrition with him. Soon, Caleb possesses the proof that Falkland is the murderer, and the latter begins to blackmail him; psychologically, he is imprisoned. This role reversal has often been misinterpreted by critics, who have underlined Falkland’s power. It is a fait accompli because persecuting is the equivalent of being persecuted. Gradually Caleb turns into the underling who is not afraid to tell the truth and overcomes the de facto juridical immunity of the ruling classes. Falkland catches up with Caleb and plants some stolen goods in his belongings so that he is charged with theft. Caleb ends up in prison; the description and denunciation of conditions in the ‘house of correction’ lay the ground for Dickens and others like Reade fifty years later. The escapee’s odyssey seems unplanned and improvised, with repetitions of scenes dictated by the need to underscore the radical protest against tyranny, privilege and arbitrary justice. Robin Hood-like outlaws of the forest are the odd answer to the iniquities of the social system.4 After 1794, Godwin’s followers formed a sect called the ‘Godwinites’, but his fame had already waned by the time he met Shelley in 1812. In old age, Godwin relaxed his more dogmatic positions, especially his outright condemnation of marriage, and emphasized that the road to social change lay through emotion and love. This backpedalling is attributable to the influence of Mary Wollstonecraft, reflected in the heroine of the novel St Leon (1799). Fleetwood (1805) marks a return, after Mackenzie, to the ‘man of feeling’. In Deloraine (1833), his last novel, Godwin goes back to the motif of incurable, self-destructive guilt, using the true story of Eugene Aram, which was to be taken up by Victorian students of psychological pathology. 4

The diagnosis of Falkland’s crime and the reason he does not confess to it – an aristocratic concern for his reputation – is contorted and psychologically weak. According to Godwin, Caleb extorts the confession from Falkland owing to the energy with which he expresses the remorse he feels in accusing him.

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§ 171. Mary Wollstonecraft It is almost an understatement to define the life of Mary Godwin, née Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), as hectic, fearless, frantic and full. The most influential and revered feminist of the eighteenth century, as well as being the mother of Mary Shelley, and thus, indirectly, of part of English Romanticism, Mary Wollstonecraft was only thirty-eight when she died, by which time she had prepared the ground for the future serial novel of the ‘governess’1 and the ‘French lieutenant’, and left behind her an ante-litteram cinematographic screenplay. If her journalism (voluminous, considering she was a young single mother with first one then two children to take care of ) is based on the necessity of following what Dante calls ‘virtude e conoscenza’ (‘virtue and knowledge’) – meaning that the aim and purpose of life is virtue by means of reason – her life demonstrates the utopian idealism of this principle. It was in fact marked by a series of generous but reckless actions, apparently at odds with both reason and virtue. It is no surprise that her theoretic vision was a deduction and a posteriori abstraction of events that happened during her childhood and adolescence; it is surprising that she emerged from a number of traumatic and, at times, destructive experiences involving the family or her social surroundings with all her moral attributes intact. What kind of traumas? Her father was an idle elder son, with a weakness for drink, who worshipped his male heir, neglected his property and beat his wife, whose only defence lay in the eldest daughter. When his first wife died, the father married the maidservant, and Mary left home (she was twenty-five at the time) to stay with a girl friend – one of the classic experiences of the feminist’s search for independence. This friend, called Fanny, died in childbirth, and was commemorated by Mary, who gave her name to her own first-born. The events of the next ten years came thick and fast: her younger sister, Eliza, ill-treated by her husband, and unable to obtain a divorce, ran away to London, followed by Mary. There the two sisters opened a school for young ladies, which was forced to close shortly after, the only good thing that came of it being the very first essay by Mary, in which she set out her ideas on education (1787).

1

See this entry in the Thematic index to Volume 5.

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Another traumatic experience was the short period spent as a governess in Ireland in the home of a lord, from which she received further confirmation that marriage was an institution based on the tyranny of the male and the passivity of the woman. She left when the lord attempted, unsuccessfully, to seduce her. Back in London, she became collaborator and consultant to a renowned radical publisher; she fell in love with the painter, Fuseli, and, with him and his wife, went to Paris to witness the unfolding of the Revolution. True to form, while in Paris she fell for the fascinating American ‘captain’, Gilbert Imlay – in reality a shady wheeler-dealer and lady’s man – and soon began to style herself Mrs Imlay, although no regular marriage contract had been signed. In 1794 her daughter, Fanny Imlay, was born. Imlay managed to persuade his wife – and baby daughter – to go to Norway on some mysterious financial expedition, which led, among other things, to a bundle of informative letters being sent from that country, which almost certainly were the inspiration for the Arctic scenes in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as well as the epistolary format of the novel (the letters in question were published by the same publisher Wollstonecraft had worked for). Mary separated from Imlay, rejecting with scorn his offers of financial help, although she did go back to him, only to find that he had, by now, another woman. One day, she jumped into the Thames with the intention of committing suicide, but was rescued by some watermen or passers-by. The last acts of this frenetic life were even more breathtakingly fast and furious: she met Godwin, became infatuated, actually married him after attempting a modern-style separation between family and professional life. The marriage was officialized for the sake of the children of both parents (this was Godwin’s third relation), and, as it were, it was an example of Kant’s practical reason prevailing over pure theory. 2. Mary Wollstonecraft’s ideas and writings, like those of Godwin, are impossible to imagine outside the context of the Enlightenment and the utopias of the French Revolution, of which she began a history, never completed, in 1794. The Revolution and its spirit, said Virginia Woolf, were ‘an active agent in her own blood’.2 Before the Vindication of the 2

TCR, Second Series, 158.

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Rights of Woman (1792), she had published a novel, Mary (1788), clearly autobiographical in the name and description of the heroine (‘a woman with the capacity for thought’). She had also published some children’s stories, of which the second edition was illustrated by Blake. It took her only a month to write the first answer (1790) in England, though not the most important one, to Burke’s Reflections, a ‘vindication’ of the rights of ‘men’, in the inclusive sense of ‘human beings’. A Vindication, organized in a number of chapters with all the linguistic frills of an academic dissertation, is already, in itself, an exhaustive catalogue of the agenda of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century feminism: women possess intellectual and decisional capacity, not just emotions; they have the right to an education, at the expense of the state, which will enable them to become better mothers; marriage is not just a formal act but a union based on love and respect; sexual love does not precede, but follows the rational choice of a partner (it is to be doubted that she managed to respect this rule: in her letters to Godwin, there are clear references to the dichotomy between reason and the heart, which cannot always be overcome; indeed, her friends saw in Mary a sexual energy, that, once released, was unstoppable). The corollary is that women should enjoy the same rights as men; particularly important was the abolition of the legal disparity which prevented them from owning property or obtaining a divorce. The doors of Parliament should be open to women as should the professions until then reserved to men. This is a radical programme, which nowadays sounds tame, maybe even obvious, as Virginia Woolf observed in her day, and which presupposes, at the basis of every functioning community, the family unit composed of two responsible parents living together in a harmonious, equal relationship. This is after all the central tenet of every pedagogical theory and every theory of the family, whether religious or not. After Mary’s death, Godwin published a memorial together with her correspondence with Imlay, scandalizing the self-righteous and holier-than-thou. He added that Mary had died an atheist, whereas in fact she had declared she was a deist. The ostracism to which she was subjected is a thing of the past, and now she is looked upon with affection and respect, despite the excited loudness and faulty logic of many of her writings.

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§ 172. Burns* I do not know whether Praz ever explained how he lit upon the title of his most famous book, La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica, a title which, in Genette’s terminology, is ‘thematic’ (and, in a way, rather disappointing for a master of tropes like Praz), subsequently transformed, in the English translation, into a ‘rhematic’ title – The Romantic Agony. Robert Burns (1759–1796) is not mentioned in this book, even in the name index, and the other numerous works by Praz contain only the most fleeting references to the Scottish poet, mainly repetitions or re-elaborations of an entry present right from the first edition *

Poems and Songs, ed. J. Kinsley, 3 vols, Oxford 1968. A complete edition of Burns was launched with the publication of the Commonplace Book together with other miscellaneous works, ed. N. Leask, Oxford 2014. Letters, ed. J. De Lancey Ferguson and  G. Ross Roy, 2 vols, Oxford 1985. The reputation of Burns in Italy is documented by Poemi e canti di Roberto Burns, ed. U. Ortensi, Lanciano 1913 (a splendidly ‘unfaithful’ transposition into late nineteenth-century Italian poetic diction), by Poemetti e canzoni, ed. A. Biagi, Firenze 1953, and by Poesie, ed. M. D’Amico, Torino 1972. Still useful is G. Lockhart, The Life of Robert Burns, Edinburgh 1828, as is Carlyle’s ‘Burns’ (a review of the former). A. Angellier, Etude sur la vie et les œuvres de Robert Burns,  2 vols, Paris 1893; J. MacIntosh, Life of Robert Burns, Paisley 1906, New York 1975; F. Bliss Snyder, The Life of Robert Burns, New York 1932; H. Hecht, Robert Burns: The Man and His Work, Eng. trans., London 1936; D. Daiches, Robert Burns, London 1952, 1966, 1981, and, with the title of Robert Burns: The Poet, Edinburgh 1994 (by Daiches are also Robert Burns, London 1957 [not the same book, but one of the series, ‘Writers and Their Work’], Robert Burns and His World, London 1971, and, with T. McDonald, Introducing Robert Burns, Edinburgh 1982); T. Crawford, Burns: A Study of the Poems and Songs, Edinburgh 1960; M. Lindsay, Burns: The Man, His Work, the Legend, London 1971, and The Burns Encyclopedia, New York 1980; Critical Essays on Robert Burns, ed. D. A. Low, London 1975, also editor of CRHE, London 1974; C. Ericson-Roos, The Songs of Robert Burns: A Study of the Unity of Poetry and Music, Uppsala 1977; The Art of Robert Burns, ed. R. D. S. Jack and A. Noble, London 1982; M. E. Brown, Burns and Tradition, London 1984; C. McGuirk, Robert Burns and the Sentimental Era, Athens, GA 1985, editor of Critical Essays on Robert Burns, New York 1998; A Burns Companion, ed. A. Bold, London 1991; J. Mackay, A Biography of Robert Burns, Edinburgh 1992; Robert Burns and Cultural Authority, ed. R. Crawford, Edinburgh 1997, also author of The Bard: Robert Burns: A Biography, London 2009; L. McIlvanney, Burns the Radical: Poetry and Politics in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland, East Linton 2002.

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in his Storia della letteratura inglese. I suspect, however, that Praz got the title from a phrase in Burns’s Commonplace Book, which is cited in practically all historical presentations: when his father, William, died, Burns vowed he would mend his ways ‘in spite of the world, the flesh and the devil’.1 Death is absent in this string, but Burns, as we shall see, is to all intents and purposes, a Romantic poet of ‘the flesh, death and the devil’ in late eighteenth-century British literature. These three themes are not, of course, the only ones in Burns’s poetic repertoire, and when they are found, they have none of the unhealthy morbidness of late Romanticism, but, instead, are spontaneous, cheerful, child-like and folkloric. As for agony, nothing could be farther from Burns, who is dynamic, and only rarely touched by the elegiac melancholy of vitalism. He sings of the flesh because he was a born philanderer, called himself ‘a fornicator’ (like the title of one of his poems),2 knew how to write about courtship, and passionate love both requited and not.3 Many of his poems are about legends and folklore involving the devil, and death is never far in Burns; not that he is ‘in love with’ death; he is, rather, moved to tears and verse by the passing of loved ones, after which he turns once more to life, and life, short and cruel though it can be, is worth the living. In a way, Burns is the most Romantic of all the Romantics, for example in his enduring revolutionary 1

2 3

The phrase is actually quoted by Praz, too, in his presentation of Burns in Poeti inglesi dell’Ottocento, Firenze 1925, 22, which is based on what was, for the time, a solid groundwork of historical, bibliographical and philological scholarship. Strangely enough, this presentation is not used in the frankly rather scrappy foreword to the selection from Burns in Il libro della poesia inglese, Messina-Firenze 1951, 297–8. Burns must have been (still) very popular in the 1930s judging from the title of Steinbeck’s novel, Of Mice and Men (1937), taken from Burns’s ‘To a Mouse’ (l. 39), one of his most moving poems. It celebrates the ‘social union of Nature’, in this case between mice and men: the poet laments the fact that the farmer has unintentionally destroyed the mouse’s nest with his plough, and ends with a Leopardi-like comparison between the mouse, only ‘touched by the present’, and the poet who can look both backwards and forwards, only to see ‘prospects drear’. An appendix of more expicitly erotic poems, not all provenly by Burns, was published after his death under the title The Merry Muses of Caledonia (1799).  D. H. Lawrence argued, suggestively but inconclusively, that Burns’s poems are the ‘swan song’ of physicality in poetry (Phoenix, vol. II, Harmondsworth 1978, 552).

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and Jacobin conviction, which gradually faded out in his English counterparts. For example, he sent the French revolutionaries some hand cannons, which had been seized from captured pirateers. They never reached their destination, but the gesture remains. He was no thinker, and his ‘philosophy’ was nothing but a version of eighteenth-century optimism, as exemplified by a line in ‘My father was a farmer’, often echoed and twisted into a thousand different versions: ‘For without an honest manly heart, no man is worth regarding’. Wordsworth admired him for the simplicity of his style, and the truthfulness of his descriptions of nature, seen as something solid, concrete, unburdened with metaphysical meaning or symbolism, but still a friend to man, who is, indeed a part of the ‘whole’ we call nature. Burns’s poems are daring: they are like the primordial afflatus of poetry itself, and have, as subjects, the ageless theme of love in all its forms, human love, love for nature, and for animals that never cease to speak to men and women. Whoever opens a book of his verses for the first time is ensnared immediately, and shares in the pathos, laughs aloud, or echoes the poet’s condemnation and contempt, identifying with him and giving up all options of estrangement. In fact, one feels like throwing all the rest of English poetry out of the window, and settling down to savour and admire each single poem in the certainty that he will never be disappointed. Popular, or folk poetry is, by definition, meant to be performed, and to be enjoyed by all, including those who cannot read or write. Burns goes further: his poetry can be enjoyed even if one does not understand every single word, thanks to the lively rhythms, the musicality – soft or strident – and its air of mystery. The critic can only repeat expressions of all-out admiration for the timeless magic of the great oral tradition – the intensity, vividness, freshness, and the ability to inflame and move. In short, the literary coefficient of Burns’ poetry is low, quite unlike that of Metaphysical poetry, closer, if anything, to the Cavaliers, at least in their songs; far from the rules of this or that ‘school’ and immune to all echoes and tropes, except those deriving from the Anglo-Scottish poetry of 300 years earlier. 2. Marked by ambition, challenges, scandals, in short everything one would expect from a dissipated genius out to live life to the full, Burns’s life has often been lumped together in the collective imagination with

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the poetic qualities as listed above. Carlyle is the first example of this tendency. Romanticism encouraged the myth of the natural-born genius, in this case, of the lad forced to work the land in the freezing polar climate of Scotland, to the detriment of his health and well-being. This was the myth of the farm-labourer who ate his frugal meal with his spoon in one hand and a book in the other; lastly, the myth of the calamitous clash of nature and culture when Burns moved to Edinburgh for a year and his poetic vein dried up4 – though it soon returned when he resumed his contact with his native soil. In the ten short years he had left to live he began again to sing with all his heart and entertain the tipplers in the neighbouring taverns.5 Burns is said to have fathered nine illegitimate children; like the Cavalier poets, he wrote passionate verses for a number of women, not all figments of his poetic imagination.6 He died in July, 1796, legend has it, as the result of rheumatic fever caught by falling asleep in the snow, dead drunk.7 Burns was, however, the first creator of his own myth in the abovementioned Commonplace Book. He had indeed a thorough knowledge of the Augustan poets, he knew a bit of French, and had the rudiments of Latin, but he exaggerated his devotion to the muse of illiterates, and created for himself the aesthetics of the ‘heaven-taught’ poet8 (see also what has been said above on Fergusson). In those days, even in conditions of extreme poverty, the Scottish farmworkers did everything they could to give their children an education, as in the case of James Hogg, a shepherd-poet, just as Burns was a farmworker-poet. His poetry had circulated in manuscript up to 1786, when it appeared in book form, mostly in the Scots dialect,

4 5 6 7 8

He began an affair with a certain Mrs McLehose, and the two wrote each other letters under the nommes de plume of Sylvander and Clarinda. He became, however, inspector of Customs, the highest public office he ever achieved. He continued nonetheless to lease farms and work them. He married Jean Armour, a builder’s daughter who had given him twins, only when his economic circumstances improved thanks to the publication of his collection of verse, and after he had contemplated taking ship for Jamaica. This was taken as true by J. C. Higgins, Life of Robert Burns, Edinburgh and Glasgow 1893, 189. The phrase is used by Mackenzie in a review.

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and was immediately all the rage in the literary circles of Edinburgh, and, later, London. He later contributed poems to the Scots Musical Museum (1787–1803), published in six volumes by James Johnson, and to A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice (1793–1818 in five volumes) by George Thomson, collecting airs and supplying missing lines if the texts were fragmentary (in fact, in many cases, Burns supplied the whole text for preexisting melodies).9 After 1786 (and up to MacDiarmid!) Burns became for his fellow Scots the national poet, on an equal standing with the English. This went some way towards satisfying a need for self-promotion that had been rankling since the time of James I, despite reservations put forward by a number of Scots, anxious about that kind of objectiveness which is a disguised form of complacent assent. Burns is so unanimously hailed as their king, that the Scots can afford the luxury of nit-picking and hair-splitting: they have no need to defend him at any cost. For example, it is generally accepted that he was something of a braggart: he struck poses, and was not averse to a sometimes saccharine sentimentalism – similar charges were to be levelled against Dickens, who, like Burns, idealized the family hearth. His morality was elastic, cavalier, and scandalous, and on several occasions he attacked the hypocrisy of Presbyterian ministers and the Calvinism of predestination. Still more daringly, he never failed to join in convivial celebrations, in which the praises were sung of the virtues of whisky and of women, the only consolations of the poor working man. But purists have seen much to criticize in Burns in point of style, diction and metre. His best poems, generally speaking, are written in the metre called ‘standard Habbie’, so-called because it was used by a certain Robert Sempill in a ballad on Habbie Simpson, also known as the piper of Kilbarchan. It consists of stanzas of six octosyllabic lines rhyming aabcbc, the fourth and sixth lines having four syllables. It is often taken for granted, though it is untrue, that Burns’s English poems are stiff and stilted, while those in Scots are, almost by definition, far superior. In reality, his language is the result

9

Burns’s popularity rapidly spread throughout Europe, and some of his ‘songs’ were set by none other than Beethoven.

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of a compromise, his native Ayrshire mixed with various other dialects being Anglicized so as to be comprehensible to English, as well as Scottish, readers. This small ‘treachery’ is often criticized, but after all it was the most that could be expected once the dream of the total independence of identity of Scottish poetry had evaporated. His language has been called artificial, modelled, syntactically and lexically, on English, English words being simply transcribed to show the Scottish pronunciation. But Burns is a master of dosing and mixing. 3. Burns burst on the scene quite suddenly, and at twenty-seven managed to have a slim volume of poems published (about thirty in all), most of them written the year before, which soon were known and loved throughout the land. In the preface, he presents himself as a simple, untaught peasant, and his book, therefore, as a kind of fake, in the manner of Chatterton. The first edition was published in Kilmarnock, and was followed by a second in Edinburgh with the addition of other poems (London 1787, Edinburgh 1793 and 1794). The Kinsley edition consists of 632 pieces, but these include attributed poems, songs from two collections of popular Scottish poetry, and other ‘fugitive’ compositions. Considered as a whole, it is a typically fragmented corpus, with no long poems: the length varies from the four lines of the epitaphs to the occasional pieces that number up to 300 lines. The three main themes, as mentioned above, are the flesh, death, and the devil. Burns often writes about the excitement of meeting, and the ecstasy of possessing various women, providing a detailed description of their appearance by means of metaphors which may be well-known and worn, but which sound new and fresh in the particular combinations and formulations Burns gives them. On more than one occasion, the tryst comes to nothing, and the poet can only accept the fact that he must leave and say farewell. Death is everywhere in Burns, which is why life is so important. Death is personified in the strange ‘Death and Doctor Hornbook’: a ghostly figure with rake and scythe recounts that the only person who can resist him is a doctor or a wizard, or an alchemist who cures, or kills those who turn to him. How Death will succeed in entrapping him we never find out, since the poem ends abruptly, leaving the reader wondering. The devil is at the heart of Burns’s

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more elaborate ballads and lyric poems. ‘Address to the Deil’ opens with stark descriptions of its appearances in myth and legend, ordinary fears, recent and childhood memories, and the effects of its malevolence on the farmer’s life. The Fall is referred to humorously, the epic or sublime being demoted to mock-heroic: ‘An’ play’d on a man a cursed brogue’.10 In the ballad, ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ (not included in the first edition), a stubborn, deaf drunkard is punished for his vice when he is besieged by spirits and escapes by the skin of his teeth. In pace and structure, the story reads like a surreal fabliau by Chaucer. The wassailing is over, and a mysterious force lifts Tam from the tavern and throws him out into the driving snow and on to his cottage, where he is awaited by his shrewish wife. At the church of Alloway – where Burns himself lived – the devil appears in the form of a hairy Cerberus leading a dance involving a number of foul, skeletal witches – though there is one, good-looking and scantily dressed in a ‘cutty sark’,11 who bewitches Tam. Satan is the bandleader of this sabba or dance of hell. According to popular superstition, witches and spirits of hell might chase living creatures but were not allowed to cross the midway point of a river or stream. Faustian damnation is avoided by a whisker, or rather, the intelligent horse’s tail the attractive witch is left clutching once Tam and the horse have passed the middle of the bridge. Burns connives here, and his moral (be moderate in eating and, especially, drinking) is tacked on. 4. The other side of the diabolical, indeed possibly a manifestation of the same, is the Calvinist religion. ‘Holy Willy’s Prayer’ anticipates Dickens and Browning and every other satirist of the hypocrisy and selfrighteousness of the ‘elect’, and, in this sense, Burns is one with Hogg. The rowdiest and loudest of the drinking songs and ballads is ‘The Jolly Beggars’ (published only after his death), in which the drinkers take turns in telling their unlikely life stories, with an abundance of insults, jeers and digs against religion and politics, as in many a rowdy evening in the pub. The 10 11

‘brogue’ means ‘trick’ here. The term became famous when, in 1869, it was given as a name to an English tea clipper: nowadays it is also the trade name for a brand of sports shirts.

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discourse dynamic is Chaucerian in its effervescent energy, and, above all, reminiscent of Skelton. At the same time it is a series of tales told to one another by various characters, the time frame being after some unspecified war, in a manner that, weirdly, brings to mind the pub scene in the second part of Eliot’s Waste Land. Burns is a superb painter of landscapes in his introductory preludes, which, when compressed into a few lines, sound like prophecies of Imagism. ‘The Brigs of Ayr’ is little less than Spenserian, a wonderful poem in which the ancient formula of flyting12 provides the framework for a prickly debate between the old bridge and the new, ending in an allegorical pageant of river nymphs and gods and other personifications. Burns is just as good at crowd scenes, balanced between realism and fantasy, as in the cinematographic sequence of the various stanzas of ‘The Holy Fair’, where little attention is paid to warnings of the coming apocalypse, and much, instead, to the business of eating, drinking, courting, and, sometimes, even fornicating. ‘Halloween’ deals with the rituals of the night of All Saints, with maidens uprooting cabbage stalks to divine their chances of finding a husband, and other spells and enchantments lovingly and suggestively described. The sentimental, Biedermeier side of Burns, so often criticized, surfaces in the patriotic poems on the national hero, Wallace, and whenever Burns takes up his Jacobite stance, as on the imprisoned Mary Stuart. However, this particular monologue, in English with just a trace of Scots, is shot through with a profound Sehnsucht. It also crops up in those nostalgic poems in which Burns presents himself as a wanderer condemned never to return to his native shores; or in the numerous elegies on animals ill-treated or misunderstood by men, like the wounded hare or the mare worn out by years of toil. In poems like ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ we even see a Dickensian celebration of the happiness around the peasant’s hearth, with the whole family intent on listening to the cotter’s reading from the Bible.

12

An exchange of insults between two rival poets; the form is much used by the socalled Scottish Chaucerians.

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§ 173. Blake* I: The first English multi-media artist William Blake (1757–1827) is one of the great ‘outsiders’ of English literature. Some of the reasons why this is so are: he has none of the scholastic or academic background of the writers of his time; because of this very lack of ‘training’, as well as his rebellious character and boundless pride

*

Complete Writings, ed. G. Keynes, Oxford 1966; Complete Poetry and Prose, ed. D. V. Erdman, with a commentary by H. Bloom, Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles 1982; another edition with partial reproduction of Blake’s paintings is William Blake’s Writings, ed. G. E. Bentley, Jr, 2 vols, Oxford 1978. Editions of the poems are Complete Poems, ed. A. Ostriker, Harmondsworth 1977; ed. W. H. Stevenson, London 1989; The Complete Illuminated Books, ed. D. Bindman, London 2000 and 2009. A Concordance to the Writings of William Blake, ed. D. V. Erdman, 2 vols, Ithaca, NY 1967. There are numerous facsimile editions of the various poems with text and illustrations, amongst which Jerusalem, ed. M. Pagnini, 2 vols, Firenze 1994, accompanied by (vol. I, 5–23) one of the best and clearest reconstructions, considering its brevity, of the Blakean ‘system’. Visioni, Milano 1965, 1993, 2014, is an anthology of Blake’s verse translated by G. Ungaretti, with a good introduction by A. Tagliaferri and glossary by M. Diacono. Libri profetici and Milton, ed. R. Sanesi, Milano 1997 and 2002. Life. A. Gilchrist, Life of William Blake, ‘Pictor Ignotus’, 2 vols, London 1863 and reprints; M. Wilson, Life of William Blake, London 1927, 1948, 1971; J. Lyndsay, William Blake: His Life and Work, London 1978; J. King, William Blake: His Life, London 1991; P. Ackroyd, Blake, London 1996; G. E. Bentley, The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake, New Haven, CT 2001. Criticism. A. C. Swinburne, William Blake, London 1868; A. Symons, William Blake, London 1907; G. K. Chesterton, William Blake, London 1910; D. Saurat, Blake and Milton, Bordeaux 1920, New York 1924; S. Foster Damon, William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols, Boston, MA 1924, and A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake, Providence, RI 1965; J. M. Murray, William Blake, London 1933; J. Bronowski, William Blake, 1757–1827: A Man without a Mask, London 1943, and William Blake and the Age of Revolution, London 1972; N. Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake, Princeton, NJ 1947, 1949, also the editor of Blake: A Collection of Critical Essays, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1966; D. Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire, Princeton, NJ 1954, and, revised, 1969, 1977 and 1991; S. Gardner, Infinity on the Anvil: A Critical Study of Blake’s Poetry, Oxford 1954; H. Adams, Blake and Yeats: The Contrary Vision, Ithaca, NY 1955, and William Blake: A Reading of the Shorter Poems, Seattle, WA 1963; A. Blunt, The Art of William Blake, New York 1959; M. Schorer, William Blake: The Politics of Vision, New York 1959; H. Bloom, The Visionary Company, Ithaca, NY 1961, Blake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument, Garden City, NY 1963, and, as editor, Modern Critical Views: William Blake, New York 1985; P. Fisher, The Valley of Vision: Blake as Prophet and

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(sometimes exacerbated by external factors, as we shall see) he was never part of any group or school of writers, or any ideological movement;1 he abhorred imitation, and, from the 1790s practically right up to his death in 1827 he dedicated himself to a kind prophetic poetry that no-one had ever thought of, much less written, before him. His most obvious Revolutionary, ed. N. Frye, Toronto 1961; J. H. Hagstrum, William Blake, Poet and Painter, Chicago, IL 1964; A. Ostriker, Vision and Verse in William Blake, Madison, WI 1965; J. Beer, Blake’s Humanism, Manchester 1968; R. Lister, William Blake: An Introduction to the Man and His Work, London 1968; Blake and Tradition, ed. K. Raine, 2 vols, London 1969; M. D. Paley, Energy and The Imagination: A Study of the Development of Blake’s Thought, Oxford 1970, and The Traveller in the Evening: The Last Works of William Blake, Oxford 2003; Blake’s Sublime Allegory, ed. S. Curran and J. A. Wittreich, Madison, WI 1973; R. Essick, The Visionary Hand: Essays for the Study of William Blake’s Art and Aesthetics, Los Angeles 1973; D. G. Gillham, William Blake, Cambridge 1973; T. Altizier, The New Apocalypse: The Radical Christian Vision of William Blake, East Lansing, MI 1974; A. K. Mellor, Blake’s Human Form Divine, Berkeley, CA 1974; CRHE, ed. G. E. Bentley, London 1975; J. Wittreich, Angel of Apocalypse: Blake’s Idea of Milton, Madison, WI 1975; S. Fox, Poetic Form in Blake’s Milton, Princeton, NJ 1976; M. Davis, William Blake: A New Kind of Man, Berkeley, CA 1977; S. Givone, William Blake: Arte e religione, Milano 1978; C. Corti, Il primo Blake. Testo e sistema, Ravenna 1980, Rivoluzione e rivelazione. William Blake tra profeti, radicali e giocobini, Napoli 2000, and Stupende fantasie. Saggi su William Blake, Pisa 2002; L. Damrosch, Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Poetry, Princeton, NJ 1980; D. H. George, Blake and Freud, London 1980; L. Tannenbaum, Biblical Tradition in Blake’s Early Prophecies: The Great Code of Art, Princeton, NJ 1982; William Blake, mito e linguaggio, ed. G. Franci, Pordenone 1984; J. Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism, Oxford 1992; E. P. Thompson, Witness against the Beast, Cambridge 1993; J. Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book, Princeton, NJ 1993; V. N. Paananen, William Blake, New York 1996; N. M. Williams, Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake, Cambridge 1998; The Cambridge Companion to William Blake, ed. M. Eaves, Cambridge 2003; S. Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossibile History of the 1790s, Chicago, IL 2003; S. S. Sklar, Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ as Visionary Theatre, Oxford 2011. 1

HWP, 655, but see, too, Chesterton 1910, 125. In 1800 Blake started a long, stormy relationship with a literary figure of the day, the mediocre but self-obsessed William Hayley, of which I shall say more below. In 1811 Blake received visits from Southey, who had looked at the odd passage from Jerusalem, and pronounced it ‘absolutely mad’. In 1825, at a party given by a collector, Blake met Coleridge, who, years earlier, had praised the Songs of Innocence.

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uniqueness lies in his being the only artist to date capable of excelling in both poetry and the visual arts,2 though other poets and novelists who were also painters came after him, like Rossetti, Morris and Lawrence. Blake called himself a ‘poet, painter and musician according to the inspiration’, and set and sang his poems. To be more precise, he was an illustrator of other poets’ works (Young, Gray, Blair,3 Dante and Chaucer), but, first of all, of his own. His art was composite and what we would call today ‘multi-medial’, made of text and integrated images.4 That Blake should be included in the history of English painting is by now generally accepted. D. H. Lawrence, according to Harold Bloom a ‘minor Blake’, was of the opinion that Blake had saved a by now dying art, and that he should be credited with representing the body, even though it was reduced at times to a mere ideogram. He was the only painter, added Lawrence, to avoid clichés and paint the human body imaginatively. For Chesterton, Blake was a classical painter whose lines were ‘firm and hard’, and whose model and mentor was the sculptor, Flaxman. From Michelangelo he took the attention to muscular structure, but his figures have none of the sheer mass and volume of the Italian’s; they have more of the Celtic predilection for curved lines and sixteenth-century Mannerism (which derives, in any case, from Michelangelo).5 Blake’s first biographer, Gilchrist, maintained that Blake was a Pre-Raphaelite in pectore, and compared him with Cimabue, Giotto and Fra Angelico. The integration of the two arts, poetry and painting, is seen clearly in the system of publication he chose and patented, again without precedent. Of all his works, only one, Poetical Sketches, was published conventionally; all the others, except one, were ‘printed’ in etchings accompanied by illustrations in black and white, or coloured by hand, using

2 3 4

5

Except, perhaps, Dyer (§ 108). Blair’s illustrations are in actual fact the work of a more conventional and commercial artist called Louis Schiavonetti. Cf. ‘Dialogando fra poesia e pittura’, in Corti 2000, 53–60, which examines four modes of integration of text with image: equivalence, connection, supplement, grafting. On Blake’s poetry as ‘the result of three components’ – verbal, visual and acoustic – see also the convincing reflections of Sanesi 1997, 166. PSL, 415.

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a technique called ‘illuminated printing’.6 Of each work a small number of etchings was produced, all carefully checked. Blake’s publishing method was antithetical to the spirit of the age, in which the reproducibility of the work of art had already taken hold. Indeed, ‘publication’ is something of a misnomer in Blake’s case, given that he was known to a small circle of friends and a handful of buyer-collectors. This situation of, in a sense, working ‘in a vacuum’ is similar to that of Hopkins fifty years later (though not as great as Blake, he too was poet, painter and musician, and belonged to a stylistic tradition not all that different to Blake). Often despised and devalued as a mere artisan – he made etchings of other artists’ illustrations as well as his own – Blake actually increased the artistic content of his product, since each etching was a work of art, and a composite one at that. In other words, he exploited the different norms and conventions of the pictorial and poetic art forms: for example, there are no authenticated copies of the Mona Lisa, only rough sketches, whereas every time a text is republished, that is an ‘authentic’ copy of the original. So the single ‘copies’ of a work by Blake, all approved by him, were bought and sold in the years to come, each one an ‘authentic’ copy. It is as if Leonardo had painted the very same Mona Lisa over and over again. Incidentally, it was thanks to the circulation of his works among an elite group that Blake was able to write, in peace and quiet, poems that, if hurried to press, would probably have met with a very cool reception. 2. To date, there have been two excellent editions (though with a few erratic black and white illustrations) of the complete written works of Blake, which include every text bearing the undisputed signature of the author. This opera omnia comprehends every written word attributed to him, including his interlinear and marginal comments made in books he had been reading; fragments of works undertaken and never brought to completion, and, therefore, not subjected to revision and correction; page 6

Obtained by means of a procedure in three phases, inverted with respect to traditional etching: the text is written, in ink impervious to acid, on a heated copper plate, which is then immersed in nitric acid, leaving only the lines of text and the illustrations, if any, in relief. Pages printed with this procedure were subsequently coloured and also modified one by one.

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upon page of ‘work in progress’, with words crossed out and corrected, and no lack of lacunae. The prophetic poems occupy about 800 of the 1,000 pages that make up this book. The more accessible Blake of the songs of Innocence and Experience writes in neat stanzas, with regular rhymes and few accentuations; one might call them attractive and a little naïf. The prophetic poems, on the other hand, are written using rich, impressive, rhythmic prose, and form a saga divided into connected acts, with a host of mythic-symbolic characters that enter and exit cyclically. Issuing from a grandiosely sublime second voice, they are, in their turn, another unicum, within a unicum. The prophetic poems come in all lengths: some are short and manageable, but three of them are extremely long farragoes that put the scholar to the test (it is to be doubted whether they are meat for the ‘common reader’); much in them is esoteric in the extreme, bordering on the incomprehensible. In other words, only the first three collections of Blake’s early poems are pure poetry; the rest is derivative, written in answer to books, theories and ideas the reader must be familiar with in order to stand any chance of understanding what Blake is talking about. Blake’s mythology, in extreme synthesis, is based on the ‘fall’ of universal man, not in the familiar version of Adam and Eve and the garden of Eden, but the fragmentation and ongoing warfare involving the two or four faces or elements that make up ‘man’, each of which aspires to supremacy over the others. The apocalypse at the end of the last three prophetic books consists in the visionary reunion in universal man of the two or four parts into which he had split. Such an event is called, in orthodox theology, ‘apocatastasis’. The divine is in man, and must reside there; man is divine, but does not know it. Moral law has no influence in a religion founded on the forgiving of sins: Jesus came not to punish us but to gather us to him, and this, Blake often says, is the equivalent of the imagination in man. From 1788 Blake waged war on sensism, rationalism, and the mechanism of Locke and Newton, and decreed the pre-eminence of the imagination. One of his mottos was: ‘see not with but through the eye’. Blake’s works, especially the prophetic books, necessitate the use of a ‘compass’ of some kind – a dictionary, or glossary or commentary – if the reader does not wish to lose himself in the labyrinth – not because Blake uses some new Finnegans Wake of a koinè, though his language is highly idiosyncratic, with capital letters in the

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wrong place, the conjunction ‘and’ always replaced by an ampersand, and occasional syntactic-grammatical anacolutha. The problem is that Blake overturns or deforms accepted meanings, and a certain term can signify one thing, but, at the same time, another, or it can mutate and nuance in meaning as the story progresses. For more than a century Blake criticism has felt obliged, or doomed, to explanatory paraphrasing, and is forever providing maps and keys for the prophetic saga, especially because it hinges on mythological heroes and personifications that appear cyclically in plots that are duplicated, or interconnected, or overlapping. All this, however, seems not to have worked: there is no general agreement on the significance of the characters, whose names, by the way, demonstrate, on Blake’s part, great imagination and onomastic expertise in mixing etymology with allusion, and using agglutination, changes of letters, lexical fusion and even inverse writing.7 Almost every individual in the enormous ‘cast’ comes back on stage in every successive act, so that it is possible to form an identikit, both synchronic and diachronic, interpreting and deciphering actions and intentions in each single appearance and throughout the poetry as a whole. However, Blake himself has been his own first exegete in the illustrations that are an integral part of the text. Their value is not at all ornamental or incremental: they bring about a transcoding of the text and of the verbal place of reference: in some cases, there is even contrast or denial. 3. What links Blake to English Romanticism, at least superficially, is the primacy of the imagination, understood, however, in a sense that would have perplexed the other Romantics: the imagination is Christ, Christ is imagination. The most obvious difference between him and the Romantic poets is this: nothing is further from Blake’s than the famous ‘language really spoken by men’ of Wordsworth’s 1800 manifesto. Furthermore, the means and method of transmission were totally different: Blake was author, printer and publisher, whereas Shelley, for example, the most ‘prophetic’ and, therefore Blakean of his contemporaries, wanted his poetry to be as 7

Not many years after Blake’s death, a similar fanciful onomastics cropped up, quite independently, and without any preceptible prophetic or allegorical design, in the sagas of Gondal and of Angria, by the young Brontë siblings (Volume 5, § 128.1–2 and 137.4).

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widely read as possible. So he took into account the laws of the market, and accepted compromise, big or small, whenever necessary. Blake, instead, was strangely similar to other writers that might be classified as reformists, utopians, or messianists, whose preaching became more impassioned as their congregations became smaller. Hopkins expressed the same objective as Blake’s in more orthodox religious terms, to transform man and society completely, starting from the analogous situation of paralysis in institutions, and from a culture that was stuck in a mechanistic and separatist rut, and was fifty years behind the times – and to reconsecrate whatever existed. There is much of Blake in the last stanza of the ‘Deutschland’ and in the sonnet, ‘God’s Grandeur’, fruits though these be of very different intellectual and religious experiences.8 As in the case of Hopkins, the tragic irony is that Blake had no readers as such, and that, like Hopkins, he came very close to talking to himself. This is not surprising, if we consider that the copies of his passionate prophecies were sold at a price that was well beyond the pocket of the very people he wanted to reach – the poor.9 Right up to the first edition by W. M. Rossetti (1874) not more than a few dozen of these copies were available to the public. It follows that, in Abrams’s words, Blake does not employ the expressive mode of a poetic ‘I’ morbidly occupied in analysing his own mental processes;10 and that, unlike, let us say, Keats, he does not write as one defeated by the outside world. Instead of succumbing, he faces it and fights, confident in victory some day. If I had to summarize all this in a formula, I should say that Blake is not a Romantic insofar as he is not a lyric poet; or he is a Romantic in the sense, as I recalled above, of Romanticism as a historical category and a broad and varied period of time. 8

Hopkins, a habitual reader of Blake, and whose documented comments are all later than 1874, recognized in himself the same schizoid tendencies, and appreciated Blake’s ‘lyrical inspiration’, mixed though it was with ‘a good deal of nonsense’. Hopkins’s own illustration of his very first poem, ‘A Vision of the Mermaids’, is predictably Blakean. 9 Ten shillings and sixpence, according to A. Lincoln (in Eaves 2003, 210), was the price of America. 10 On the subject of ‘Blake and Romanticism’ see the essay of the same name by D. Simpson in Eaves 2003, 169–87.

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4. Until the end of the nineteenth century, Blake was little known, and either ignored or half-heartedly accepted as a kind of lunatic not devoid of genius (Wordsworth, Ruskin). Symptomatically, Gilchrist’s 1863 biography, which remains a milestone, was dedicated to a ‘pictor ignotus’, and W. M. Rossetti, the editor of his poetry, thought it expedient in 1870 to offer readers only the written text, without etchings and illustrations, and typographically normalized. The pseudo-neurological discussion of the question whether Blake was literally or ‘only’ metaphorically mad occupied several pages in Chesterton’s 1910 study, and similar hostility is discernible in Saintsbury, who pronounced much of the prophetic books mere curiosities, and Blake’s ideas on art and literature downright ludicrous. Part of the British critical establishment, particularly pragmatic and traditionalist, fenced off the early poems and turned their fire on the fanatics of the prophetic Blake, at first very few, but growing rapidly in number. The aesthetic premise of these critics – many of them sceptics, reductionists or even negationists – was that poetry is language, metaphor, rhythm and metre, and not only the abstrusities of theology and theosophy. They therefore, in turn, proposed a distinction between Blake ‘as literature’ and Blake ‘as thought’. In the 1920s and later, these dissenting critics were seen as short-sighted, dilettante Philistines, but they were blessed in having an authoritative sponsor, T. S. Eliot, who in a few short paragraphs called a halt to the Blakean revival that was just about to take off,11 by expressing grave doubts on his artistic value, and finding him lacking in a sense of form,12 and unconvincing in his attempts to yoke together philosophy and poetry. Similar ungenerous interpretations of Blake, though fewer, have not completely disappeared even today, when it seems all too easy to extrapolate a patchwork of exegesis, even from esteemed critics, with a view to holding them up to ridicule.13 On the contrary, American Jewish

11 12 13

Frye (in Frye 1966, 1) was to dismiss as belonging to ‘a vanished world’ the kind of judgement made by Eliot. Symons 1907, 86, had already charged Blake with ‘formlessness’. See, for example, Gillham 1973, a polite but firm demolition of the prophetic books. The ‘prophetic’ Blake, and especially Jerusalem, is still being snubbed by S. Prickett in TLS (22 March 2013).

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and Protestant criticism, especially, preceded by the Pre-Raphaelites and Yeats, had shifted the centre of Blake’s poiéin, ignoring the famous anathema against those who render still more obscure the obscure work they should explain and paraphrase. Almost at the same time, Blake was raised as a barricade against encroaching nihilism by writers like D. H. Lawrence, Huxley and Yeats, and he influenced, in my opinion, more than is usually realized, the dream delirium of Dylan Thomas. Blake became then popular with the Beat Generation and the student movement of the 1960s. Academic revaluation was helped by Jungian and Freudian criticism (for example, N. O. Brown), who saw heralded in his poems the antagonistic structure of the psyche and the operations of the subconscious.14 The anticipations of Nietzsche should not be forgotten either.15 It goes without saying that in this chapter on Blake I will concentrate on the most important, and most uncontroversial aspects of the prophetic books, treating them primarily ‘as literature’. § 174. Blake II: Biography and intellectual growth Born in London in 1757, the son of a hosier – an Irishman, according to Chesterton (who thought this detail highly significant) and, according to others, called O’Neil, later changed to Blake – Blake claimed to have had his first vision at the age of four, when he saw God ‘put his head to the window’. He had his second at eight or ten, a vision of angels with shining wings perching on the boughs of a tree, but his father thought he was lying and chastised him. Perhaps his parent’s diffidence was at the origin of Blake’s undying hostility to any kind of father figure. Blake’s early education was irregular, and he did not go to university. His gift for drawing took him to an art school in 1767 and later to an apprenticeship in the shop of the London etching firm, Basire. He worked at the Royal Academy from 1779, and developed a deep hatred of the president, Reynolds. He also worked in a printing shop as an engraver of illustrations. In 1780 he met the Swiss painter, Füssli (later naturalized as Fuseli), and the sculptor, John 14 15

Tagliaferri 2014, xvii. For a short history of the reception of Blake up to the present, and the latest developments to date, see Corti 2002, 5–18.

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Flaxman, a follower of the theories of the Swedish philosopher, Emanuel Swedenborg. Blake’s involvement in the Gordon Riots has been explained in the following way: it was feared that the government’s tolerance towards Catholics was due to the fact that they were thinking of sending Irish soldiers to fight against the American rebels.16 Government police suspected artists and thinkers of fanning the flames of Dissent, and Blake, along with others, was arrested and imprisoned for a while on the charge of sedition. After a chaste adolescent love affair that did not last long, he married a Battersea factory girl, Catherine Boucher, in 1782. They were a perfect match, in spite of having completely different temperaments.17 They bring to mind James and Nora Joyce, as Joyce himself acknowledged in a note he wrote on William and Catherine Blake. Catherine signed the wedding register with a cross, but, unlike Nora Barnacle, she became an invaluable collaborator, and, ex-illiterate as she was, Blake’s amanuensis. In 1784, with his brother and a partner, Blake set up shop as an etcher; this did not last long. According to Blake, his brother, who died prematurely, appeared to him and showed him how to etch text on copper and the technique of ‘illuminated printing’. From 1800 until 1803 the Blakes were forced by straitened circumstances to accept the hospitality of a rich patron called Hayley, in Felpham (Sussex). Hayley asked him to provide illustrations for the poems of Cowper, whom he had taken care of some time before. It was during this stay at Felpham that something strange and surreal happened, which was incorporated into one of Blake’s works (there is a Joycean touch to this anecdote, and indeed it may well have inspired the ‘incident in the park’ at the beginning of Finnegans Wake). This is what happened: a drunk soldier, one John Schofield or Scholfield, of the Royal Dragoons, 16

17

Blake, an enemy of Puritanism, might have, as a consequence, sympathized with Catholicism, but there are no traces in his writings of any references to the question at all, and D. Bindman (in Eaves 2003, 108) calls him ‘fervently anti-Catholic’. Newgate prison, in any case, had, since 1780, been the symbol and synecdoche of the trampling underfoot of freedom, just like the Bastille, ten years later, in The French Revolution. It is still a mystery why the couple had no children, though some have hypothesized that they did have a still-born daughter, and that this event is reflected in The Book of Thel.

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managed to get into the garden of Blake’s house, and, after an exchange of insults, was forcibly ejected by the poet. The episode ended up in court in Chichester, where Blake was acquitted of the charge of sedition and of offending the king.18 On his return to London, he set about writing the text and creating the illustrations for his last three prophetic books. He was poor, frustrated by the public’s complete lack of interest in his artwork (an exhibition of his paintings in 1809 was savaged by the only critic who took the trouble to write about it) and pushed to one side. He regained strength and determination to go forward thanks to commissions from or through an admirer of his and fellow painter, Linnell; his last illustrations were of Homer, Virgil, Dante,19 and the Book of Job. According to an unverified and unverifiable tradition, Blake’s end was like his beginning: he died singing his visions of heaven. 2. Numerous reconstructions have been attempted of the ‘system’ Blake proudly called his own and no-one else’s, which, expressed in plain language, does contain some quite terrifying contortionisms and howlers on the plane of logic. Blake uses a whole constellation of sources and formative cultural experiences and tries to meld them; it is worth looking at them separately. Along with the great philosophical movements, there is some evidence, especially for the period 1780–1795, of a great deal of subterranean

18

19

The memorandum that Blake wrote on the event is vaguely and suggestively oneiric. The charge vehemently denied by Blake was that he intended to send maps of the surrounding area to the French. But the Joycean ‘pearl’, ready to be strung onto the necklace of Finnegans Wake, is that the soldier called Blake a ‘military painter’, when he probably meant ‘miniature painter’! There are two or three soldiers in Joyce, and Schofield was backed up by a fellow-squaddie. The poem by Blake in which this event is oneirically present is Jerusalem. Frye 1949, 330, hypothesizes, but doesn’t really believe, that it was Hayley who set the soldier up to making the charge, to rid himself of Blake. These were left uncompleted. Blake (cf. A. Ward, in Eaves 2003, 33–4) considered Dante’s Inferno a Satanic creation, and accused Dante of atheism in that he was in favour of divine punishment for sinners, and stated that salvation lay only in and through the Church. In Blake’s illustrations, the negative figure of Vala in Jerusalem is superimposed on Beatrice and, especially, the Virgin Mary.

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influence on Blake from religious sects and political groups; this much is clear, notwithstanding Blake’s reticence on his formation and the lack of documentary proof of the people he frequented. First and foremost, Blake challenges the rationalism of the Enlightenment with all its implications in the fields of epistemology, psychology, sexual ethics, politics, religion and aesthetics. Rationalistic sensism is rejected and intuition and imagination are exalted. Filled with the spirit of the Encyclopédie, he gets to the point at which rationalism turns into its opposite. In the field of religion, too, he reacts against traditional Christianity, dabbles in Satanism, but then reverts to almost orthodox positions laced with a series of speculations deriving from a wide range of occultisms: from Boehme, for example, Blake takes the theory that God is originally both benevolence and anger, and that the objective is to reunite the two principles and favour the fusion of opposing forces. In the field of politics, he came under the influence of Paine, who was vocal in his support for the American colonists, and, with Godwin, campaigned for the emancipation of women, the sexual revolution, the basic freedoms, and, of course, the French and American Revolutions. ‘Shattering the fetters and chains of imprisonment and slavery’ became a kind of mantra; he often used the word ‘fetters’ in his correspondence, and felt that he, too, personally, was ‘enchained’. In Blake’s day, mankind was hibernating, as it were; he often uses the word ‘vegetate’, though not only in this sense. Many felt the need of an awakening shock. Man was in chains, the ‘mind-forged manacles’ of ‘London’; a whole philosophical system was responsible for this state of affairs, and had to be overthrown – the innocuous but mind-numbing sensist, rationalist and deist philosophy, unable by now to provide the ideological launch pad for a new departure. The desire for renewal found expression in the two revolutions: it was as if the whole universe were yearning for a freedom that could no longer be denied. Blake relied on his imagination, because apocalypse and metanoia could only be dreamt of; reason would reject them. Milton had spoken, so now Blake could only parody or imitate Paradise Lost. He then ‘re-imagined’ the Bible thanks to his extraordinary visionary creativity. He wrote, not one long poetic synthesis, but a series of acts that were short, mediumlength, or very long, and overlapped in parts, giving rise to a highly personal mythopoeia.

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3. E. P. Thompson20 has shown that, when young, Blake drew inspiration from a mixed clandestine tradition that identified with a number of sects or cells, at times organized round a family. One such was Antinomianism, an ancient heresy relaunched in England by Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Blake was introduced to this so-called heresy by the preaching and esoteric literature of several Dissenting sects. Christ crucified, according to the Antinomians, had redeemed man from the Law’s curse, so men were justified only through their faith in Christ and not through good works. The logical conclusion was that it was sufficient to believe for all sins to be forgiven; hence the almost permanent state of grace they thought they possessed, and their extreme indifference to sins, which, seen in this light, were not sins at all. The fact is, many Antinomians, convinced of their ‘election’, abandoned themselves to fornication, spoke out against church ritual, did not attend church services, and placed the gospel of pardon above the prescriptive, repressive tablets of the law handed down to Moses. Blake was no Calvinist, and rejected the doctrine of predestination; but he did subscribe to the opposition between the Mosaic law and the gospel of Christ: in one of his poems he says: ‘Satan […] the Moral Law from the Gospel rent / He forg’d the Law into a sword’. The Muggletonians, a tiny anticlerical sect of followers of the mad prophet, Ludowick Muggleton – they still exist today – had no physical place of worship except private houses and inns; they printed their texts in the utmost secret, wanted as they were by political and ecclesiastical authorities alike. From a doctrinal point of view, they maintained that: after the age of ‘water’ and that of ‘blood’, mankind had reached the age of the ‘spirit’; matter is inert, and existed before the Creator; God manifests himself in the creation of contraries, and Satan is the god of reason; most importantly, Cain was born from the union of the Serpent with Eve. Hence the Blakean doctrine of the two ‘seeds’, of Satan/Serpent and God, in other words, Cain and Seth. The theory of the two seeds, and of a devil and a god co-existing in man is echoed clearly in Blake in the dynasty of Satan/Cain, which, in his mind, 20 This exposition owes much to Thompson 1993. The ‘Muggletonian thesis’ has however given rise to a still-raging war among experts ( J. Mee, in Eaves 2003, 136, for example, is one of those against).

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represented the powerful and the ruling classes. The same can be said of God’s sexual generation (God entered Mary’s womb and ‘dissolved’ his divinity in this action, which is equivalent to getting rid of the Trinity). The Muggletonians were probably the richest source of ideas for Blake on at least four basic themes: the ‘Law’ equals ‘Reason’; Reason is equivalent to the Satanic principle because of the Fall; the copulation of the serpent with Eve (as seen in a number of Blake’s etchings); the incarnation of God in Christ. As a child, Blake had had his fill of the doctrines of Muggletonianism – not surprisingly, since his parents belonged to that sect (his mother was the widow of a Muggletonian hymn-writer). Nonetheless, he weeded out those doctrines he could not agree with, was, in some degree, affected by the very rationalism he fought against, and went back to the beginning with Boehme and Swedenborg. Eventually, at the age of thirty, he formed his own brand of Antinomianism. Muggletonianism, as the formative agent of much of Blake, had the further advantage of being a political movement composed mainly of artisans, who stubbornly attacked the dominant ideology; after all, its roots were in the radicalism of the Civil War, which meant that the Muggletonians advocated the radical transformation of society. 4. It may be that Blake took part in the meetings organized by the followers of the Swedish mystic, Swedenborg, in 1788, but if he did, it was to confirm what he himself had already thought out, and to discard the rest. The nub of the problem is the divinity of man, the concept of the ‘divine human’; to be more precise, the divine humanity of Christ, the god-man glorified or elevated to the status of the one God, which did away with the Trinity (unlike the Unitarians, however, who denied the divinity of Christ).21 Mary represented human nature which had harboured the divine seed of the Father, the male principle; but the female of the human species was imperfect and impure (a touch of male chauvinism there). In the crucifixion and resurrection, Christ had freed himself of matter (deriving from the mother, and, ipso facto, from evil). The poems Blake wrote after his contacts with the Swedenborgians are full of echoes of these doctrines, but also contain striking differences. God, according to Blake, is not inaccessible, 21

Or rather, the Swedenborgians accepted the Trinity, but only as expressed within Christ himself.

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and man is not an insignificant mite. He propounds an egalitarian humanism on the basis of which man adores in the godhead not a transcendent, unknowable being, but those very qualities that he, too, possesses. Blake’s man, then, is Titanic and Faustian, not prostrate and weak as the Swedenborgians would have him. Blake fills the gap, and defines man as divine, formulating a creative contradiction that leads directly to the last prophetic books. However, when he repeats Swedenborg’s emphasis on the law of forgiveness, and on Christ as the symbol of forgiveness, the reasoning comes full circle, because we are back to the Antinomian repudiation of the moral law. Blake stopped attending Swedenborgian meetings in England not so much because of theological differences, as for political reasons: these sects were drifting to the right and providing support for established authority and the ‘ecclesia’ as ritual, when Revolution had just swept away the ancien régime in France. He agreed with Paine on the evils to be targeted – Church and state – but attached no hope of salvation to the regeneration of these two organisms: what was needed was a new Jerusalem. After 1792, he developed an interest in the history of religions, and was struck – one might say, ‘thunderstruck’ – when he read a translation of Ruines by the French atheist, Volney. This essay in comparative mythology concluded that all religions derive from a common source, the cult of the sun, and that all featured ‘divine’ personifications of human needs and natural phenomena lifted from their original context and offered to the people by the clergy as mysteries and objects of superstitious belief. Volney’s aim was in line with the principles of the Enlightenment: man must free himself of religion, and reach out to his fellow-men in a spirit of self-awareness. For Blake, instead, ‘all deities reside in the human breast’. At the end of the cycles what remains is not Reason sweeping away the clergy, but eternal man asserting his humanity. Furthermore, while Volney emphasized the supremacy of reason and the senses, Blake exalted poetic genius and the prophetic spirit. For Blake, God is not the god of lies and mystery, but the god of poetry and the imagination. So, Blake wished to reform the social context of men, which at the beginning was based on love not selfishness, but he could not reconcile this with naturalistic psychology, according to which egoism is the mainspring of all actions. For this reason, he reverted, once again, to the basic doctrines of his old Antinomian faith: to build the new

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Jerusalem it was necessary to inject an element from outside the system of rationalism, and that element was the mercy of Christ. § 175. Blake III: The contrary states of the human soul Poetical Sketches was published in 1783, thanks to Flaxman and to a certain Reverend Mathew, who may have suggested the title; Blake, who hated interference from patrons, destroyed many of the copies.22 More than half of the ‘sketches’ are simply called ‘songs’, and, for perhaps the first and only time, partake of the style of post-Elizabethan lyric, while others derive from contemporary pre-Romantic poetry, including Ossian. Nothing could be more conventional (except that, by the time Blake wrote them, they sounded old-fashioned) than pretending to be a shepherd and starting off with four songs on the seasons of the year. Read in a prophetic sense, with Blake’s implication of the term, these four songs introduce the anthropomorphic representation of the seasons, starting with holy, ‘angel-eyed’ Spring, whose ‘eyes are eyed by other eyes’, those of mortals who, here on earth, see her and desire the gifts she brings. The epiphany is dazzling. The poem on spring is, furthermore, a formal invocation addressed both to the angelic icon and the five senses, including smell and taste. The tired, sickly earth was awaiting her coming and preparing for it. But all four seasons are literal apparitions, and, implored to stay, disappear. The forces of nature are benevolent, but are aware of a possible conflict (or contrast) with other evil forces that might prevail. In short, this might, in fact, be the ‘quartering’ of Albion.23 The bird that chirps its way from field to field is, at first,

22 Above all, he had made fun of the pretentiousness of the Reverend and his wife in the unfinished prose satire, An Island in the Moon, a real hapax full of Swiftian verve and a foretaste of Lewis Carroll’s nonsense, with inconclusive, rambling speeches, nursery rhymes, absurdities galore, alongside rough drafts of poems that would later be inserted in Songs of Innocence. Mathew (but the identifications are far from sure) is called the ‘obtuse angle’, while, among many other acquaintances hidden under false names, the type of researcher without imagination is referred to as the ‘lazy inquisitor’, and the scientist (perhaps the chemist-preacher, Priestley) as ‘inflammable gas’. Blake objectivizes himself, and, in parts, distances himself, in ‘Quid the Cynic’. 23 § 176.4.

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free, and revels in his freedom, but then he is caught and locked in a cage for the enjoyment of Apollo or the god of Love, who claps his hands and laughs at him. He has been tricked and fooled, and now is behind bars. These thematic references make more poignant the celebration of bright ‘innocence’, conveyed with lulling rhythms and echoes of pastoral poetry. The Gothic and the Ossianic are the inspiration for two ballads dealing with someone called Elenor, in a forbidding castle (the height of Radcliffianism) and, above all, a tyrant called Gwin, mindless of his people’s hunger and trampler of their liberty. In the fragment of an unfinished play on Edward II, too, the cause of freedom spurs patriots to perform heroic deeds, defying death in the certainty that they will be admitted to the Elysian Fields. This and other dramatic sketches constitute an early example of Blake’s prophetic voice in the form of imaginative, arcane orations, like those put in the mouths of his symbolic simulacra, starting with Tiriel. The interlinear glosses to Lavater’s aphorisms of 1788 and those to Swedenborg are seeds that may be arranged in some sort of embryonic systemization. Blake learns and begins to take pleasure in aphoristic expression, which has the advantage of being, if necessary, arcane, enigmatic and sibylline. He objects to Lavater that man is not a simple or faulty being (because evil and good could not co-exist in a single essence); in man, good and evil do co-exist. And yet, strange to say, evil is capable of good, but not vice versa. If man were only evil, regeneration, or redemption, would be impossible. But the deduction is not completed. Blake already is able to present theses and find antitheses to them. In the two series of aphorisms entitled ‘There is no natural religion’, he lists first some perfectly orthodox axioms in the tradition of Locke and Hume, and then their exact opposites, suggesting that it is necessary to go beyond ordinary perception and use the imagination to satisfy a ‘desire’ that is ‘infinite’. ‘Poetic genius’ is the creative afflatus in aesthetics and, in theology, the spirit of prophecy. In 1788 Blake had, therefore, already liquidated, indeed, overturned, the prudent philosophy of the sensists, recognizing the urgent need of knowledge that was not filtered through sensory experience. 2. In Songs of Innocence (1789), ‘etched’ by himself, Blake returned to the dominant genre of the earlier collection, the song, in the same pastoral contexts of green fields surrounding the big cities, or quite ‘absolute’ and

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independent of references to real space and time. Somewhat hidden in these songs is a story, or embryonic saga: a piper has a vision of an angelic boy who invites him to write, instead of just blowing his pipe, so he ‘plucks a hollow reed’, makes a pen, and writes on the water. The criticism that might be moved against the poem – its ‘namby-pamby’ diction and sing-song rhythm – concerns its mimetic nature. To sing of the lamb, as the piper is exhorted to do in the poem of the same title, is equivalent to celebrating the hypostasis contained in the title in its double valency, literal and anagogic, because the lamb is also the Lamb. In the ‘song’ the lamb is named after Christ, and Christ after the lamb, in a double or triple correspondence because the poet, too, is a child and therefore participates in the nature of the lamb and of the Lamb ( Jesus exhorts us to be like children). The phenomenology that meets the eye is that of a human and animal cosmos at first lost, and then led towards its true destination. An ant finds its way back home to its little ones through the darkness lit up by the firefly. Lyca, a girl whose name is etymologically linked to the word for ‘wolf ’, loses her way in the night and is protected by innocent wild beasts. The lion does not attack her parents when they come looking for her. The little scenes are meant to be moving, and even maudlin, because Blake is, as it were, holding back from lighting the fuse of the explosive theme of oppression: the children play happily under the watchful eye of the old folks, then the day ends, and with it, their play. ‘On Another’s Sorrow’ is a traditional pietistic prayer. The poem about the chimney sweep – who remembers en passant that he was sold by his father when he was still a baby – shows that Blake can fit a complete, articulated anecdote into five quatrains. The subject of child labour in the society of the time is only touched upon. On Holy Thursday, schoolchildren march obediently to St Paul’s. The black boy is conscious of the colour of his skin, and his mother tells him that a day will come when black and white will be brothers in the sight of God. The lesson of the angel, however, is ironic and sounds like a faux-pas: if you are good, God will be a father to you and you shall have joy. 3. Songs of Innocence clearly became a contrastive diptych in 1794, when they were republished together with Songs of Experience, with the secondary title of ‘Shewing of the two contrary states of the human soul’. In the meantime, Blake had already experimented a different, more visionary and

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prophetic voice, and it is this voice that is heard in the first poem: the prophetic bard, seer and recipient of the Word, urges nature and man to renew themselves in preparation of the dawn. The poetic voice is still prevalently that of the inquisitive, critical adult, but remains, at the same time, that of the cheerful, happy child, so that the poems now become denunciations of the plight of children. Reality presents opposing phenomena and contrary proposals: altruistic love does exist, but so does its opposite, self-interest and selfishness; the idea of imprisonment is conveyed by the frequent use of the verb ‘to bind’ in its various forms. No-one is free. When children are born they are allowed at first to play in the green fields, but a shadow hangs over them; in the affluent society of the late eighteenth century, children are ‘reduced’, and live in poverty despite the wealth around them. The chimney-sweep has become the symbol of one who removes the ‘soot’ of society, its dirt, and takes it onto his own body, like a little Christ. In this poem, the chimney-sweep’s parents are in church as if to remind the reader of the other repressive forces of society, the priesthood, the king and even a God whose real nature is misinterpreted. The allegory of decadence and disease becomes symbol in the cankered rose and the fly which, like Burns’ mouse or hare, is the victim of man’s carelessness. Blake’s fly brings to mind Shakespeare’s line in King Lear: ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods’. The tiger in Blake is the geometrical, symmetrical result of the fusion of metals in a forge,24 the all too perfect work of a God that thinks too much, a ‘Urizenic’ god, implicitly criticized as aspiring like Icarus or Daedalus, and eager to mount high, like some Elizabethan Titan. Once dethroned, he becomes Vulcan, bending to the forge with hammer, anvil and chains, those very chains he uses to make prisoners of men. From a certain perspective one might say that the tiger is the creation of a Satanic God, or even Satan himself; but the image of Vulcan and the forge will re-appear as a positive in the paraphernalia of Los in the Prophetic Books. Following the order of appearance of the poems in the book, the child visits the garden of love where he finds a chapel, a symbol whose significance is

24 The tiger’s ‘symmetry’ is mentioned in the fourth line of the poem, the only one which is asymmetrical, being a seven-syllable line in a general prosody of octosyllabics.

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doubled by the fact that it is closed; in a successive vision the garden is full of graves, and priests are busy binding and gagging desires. The reasoning child is whipped and burned like a martyr at the hands of the pagans of Rome for saying that he cannot love God more than he does. Adam and Eve, or figures who look like them, taste sex and are punished. ‘London’ represents a ‘chartered’ city, divided up into areas where the citizens are not allowed; humanity is bound and fettered by a deliberate policy of generalized and absolute oppression. Most critics maintain that Blake modified the song of innocence, inadequate as it was to describe the world around him, and that experience follows innocence. But I personally think it is possible to invert the order, making experience come first – the experience of dispersion, fragmentation and the ‘fall’ – followed by the return of innocence, although redemption is never brought about and signs of experience continue to lurk in the heart of innocence. The restoration of innocence is the purpose of the work done by energy on experience. § 176. Blake IV: The Satanic verses Beginning with Thel in 1789 Blake inaugurated a series of prophetic books or poems of varying length, written in lines of up to fourteen syllables and in free rhyme, or alternatively, in octosyllabics, and with books divided into chapters as in the Bible. They were often called just that, books, with a further example of mimesis, thus assuming the form of an apocryphal work or a re-writing. Most of the poems were etched, so that the internal unit of measurement is not the printed page but the plate, and especially in this case, a ‘stereophonic’, or, rather, ‘stereoscopic’ reading is required, with one eye on the text and the other on the accompanying illustration. This visual corpus possesses an autonomy of its own, and forms a small niche in Blake’s artistic production. The Prophetic Books present a series of frescoes in which the same characters appear alongside others, and the same events are seen from different angles. The resulting epic saga shows an esoteric theological design in which, as I mentioned, a private mythopoeia is mixed with a patchwork of elements from post-Biblical myths and various western esoteric, gnostic, occultist and cabalistic traditions. The mode throughout is oneiric and visionary, with frequent overlappings of the real and the symbolic. Whole sections stand out for their suggestive power;

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lengthy speeches and ‘stage directions’ are a homage paid by Blake to the Elizabethan playwrights and to Milton or Ossian. In a hypothetical history of style the poems would exemplify the triumph of imagination and metaphor; in a history of sensibility, this is the dawning of the neo-Baroque tradition which, born of Milton, was to re-appear in the nineteenth century in Francis Thompson and Hopkins, and in the twentieth, in Dylan Thomas. Paradoxically, it is fortunate that some of the prophetic poems are extant, or were planned, in only one book: the actions represented are fast, hallucinatory and hyperbolic and immensely readable. As in every symbolic-allegorical or prevalently symbolic transposition, there is ample margin for interpretation, and indeed each critic has his own particular reconstruction. The job of decoding is helped by onomastics and toponyms; Greek and Hebrew etymons, in particular, are a key, as are the ‘avant-textes’ embedded in the titles. The history of the interpretations of the Blakean texts suggests that he used opacity to mask his thoughts on the politics, history, institutions, religion, philosophy and the whole epistemology of the western world at the end of the century he lived in. The condition of women, too, with the patriarchal society, slavery, capitalism and the economy all end up in the mythopoeic melting pot. Blake takes sides with one of his contemporaries, Gibbon (whom he hated), and sees around him only sloth, acquiescence, remissiveness and decadence: the therapy lies in the contraries of these vices, and in Blake we feel the vibrations of messianism rather than nostalgia for a political formula equivalent to the Roman Empire at its height. 2. The two collections of Songs seem to belong to a completely different mode of expression with respect to the ‘prophetic’ texts. They are ‘as clear as water’, to use Giuseppe Ungaretti’s phrase, which the science of hermeneutics has accordingly subjected to all kinds of inquisitorial procedures to break through what it sees as ‘fake simplicity’ (Ungaretti suspected this too). It has done this by resorting acrobatically to supplementary and supra-segmental channels of signification like enigmistics, or finding anagrams, palindromes and charades, and by means of acrostic readings of the first letters of words. Other poems, which are openly complex, like ‘The Tyger’ or ‘The Sick Rose’, or the three contained in the Pickering MS, and, above all, The Book of Thel and Tiriel, have been tackled too summarily by postulating them as ‘allegories of allegories’, which, as such, can contain a

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practically limitless numbers of meanings. From the point of view of form, The Book of Thel, written and etched in 1789 on six plates, is the lament of the young girl, Thel, for the transitory nature of life and the fleeting beauty of nature. The lily of the valley, the cloud, the worm and the turf, all teach us to spurn indolence and seize energy, because the cosmos is an organism is which every part has its function and its use. The symbols represent the decadence of the Church, while the action of the poem signifies sexual immaturity, especially when the woman sees and rejects the phallic worm. The final plate is a katabasis in the course of which Thel visits the underworld and escapes to the valley of Har, which symbolizes innocence, as Hades does experience. One of the pre-Nietzschean refrains of the young Blake is the ‘weakness’ of man in history, which may be complementary to innocence, or an excess of innocence. Let us not forget that Blake saw ‘marks of weakness’ in London. Thel, too, may represent a symbolic form of weakness, renunciation, inability to act, and absence of transforming spirit. Tiriel (1791, but written in 1789 in eight parts) anticipates Coleridge’s ‘Rime’ (in Tiriel’s ‘once piercing eyes’), but it is also a deformed reminiscence of King Lear, especially when the daughter, Hela, accompanies her blind father (like Edgar in Shakespeare). Queen Myratana is dying and King Tiriel turns on his children, ordering them to prepare the burial of their mother, but they refuse, and remind him of their rebellion. In the second plate Tiriel is a wanderer; he meets his parents, Har and Heva, by now old and frail, but does not reveal himself to them. Continuing his wandering, he comes across his brother Ijim, who notes his resemblance to the Tiriel he once knew. But Ijim thinks he is a tempter who turns into various creeping animals, and sends him back to his palace. Hela accompanies him on another journey, accusing him of egoism and of saving her only so that she could be his guide, given that he is blind. Tiriel dies. The poem is the first mythopoeic formulation of the theme of the tyrannical god, with a further contemporary reference to the mad King George III. The inertia of the parents is a criticism of England’s deafness to the calls for revolution and change. The French Revolution (1791) – seven books promised, of which only one extant, based on the proofs of the printer, Joseph Johnson – is, of course, a militant poem, and follows, with a certain diegetic order, but as yet without Blake’s mythic and onomastic symbolism – the debate of the assembly that preceded the storming of the Bastille; or rather,

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Blake presents a series of hypostases and conceptual personifications of the Revolution.25 3. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790 and 1793) proceeds in a series of non-consecutive flashes, expressed both in verse, and, especially, prose, and varies the register of images – impalpable, suggestive and vehicles both of polemic and of grotesque, visionary humour. Conceptual contraries are set out in columns of sayings, proverbs, and aphorisms, some explicit, others sibylline in their meaning.26 The long lists of Satanic proverbs or verses contain what appear to be words of wisdom turned upside down, such as issued from the mouths of Shakespeare’s fools. All should serve the needs of a pars destruens and a pars construens. Blake identifies and denounces a number of ideological and theological concepts that have been detrimental to man and must therefore be modified and put right. He is the kind of writer whose role it is to denounce the distortions of the day, the cancer or paralysis, by means of medical metaphors, like Joyce 100 years later; significantly, the cancer comes from the Church, an institution by now fossilized and sapless. The distinction between good and evil has been blurred by the confusion created by historical faiths and laws, and organized religion is the principal agent of disbelief and the overturning of values. Human desire is Satanic, as is the energy that feeds it; it is in this poem that we find Blake’s famous paradox: ‘Milton was […] of the Devil’s party without knowing it’. Regeneration will come when energy resumes its dominance over reason. Critics lost no time in seeing in this work an anticipation of Freud’s theory of the psyche as the coexistence of contraries:27 the ‘superego’ is reason, which acts as censor over the libido, which is the id. Blake also foreshadows Nietzsche when he extols unfettered desire as an antidote to pusillanimity. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is punctuated by a number 25

As convincingly argued by Paananen 1996, 58–65, Louis XVI is a Urizenic prefiguration characterized by staticity and solipsism, while there appears, among the prisoners in the Bastille, a mysterious champion of liberty like Orc. Louis XVI is, in turn, doubled and triplicated in the figures of the Duke of Bourgogne and the Archbishop of Paris. 26 The proverbs section has an appendix in the later poem, ‘Auguries of Innocence’, in rhyming couplets, each of which is a paradoxical proverb in favour of innocence and against experience or wickedness. 27 Swedenborg had indicated a ‘balance’, not a marriage.

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of ‘memorable fantasies’ attacking priestly castes and underlining that faith lies in the heart and bosom of each human being. Ezekiel explains how one religion colonizes by discrediting other faiths, and points in particular to the religions deriving from Jehovah. The end is an anti-climax: the whole point was to contest and make fun of Swedenborg. Why? Swedenborg saw only good angels, and was unfamiliar with devils, who teach the true religion and hate the one currently practised. Furthermore, Swedenborg kept body and soul divided. It is a devil that says that Christ – Christ as energy, not the eschatological figure – came to wage war on the law and give the ten commandments a libertarian interpretation. 4. America (1793) is the first of Blake’s prophetic books in which history – freely dramatized, with several glaring anachronisms and omissions – becomes part and parcel of his mythopoeia. Blake looks back on the American Revolution, a prelude to the French, which occurred at the end of a period of twelve years in which ‘angels and weaklings’ were to rule the strong, until France received ‘the demonic light’. Orc is Prometheus, blind and bound; but he is also represented as a serpent because he personifies the spirit of freedom and Satan’s energy. He is hairy and fiery; as such he is the anarchic dethroner of the god of the ten commandments. In Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), the daughters of Albion, that is to say, English womanhood, look westward towards America, whence might come forms and instances of female emancipation. But also where slavery was still practised.28 Oothoon carries out that sexual initiation which is refused by Thel in the poem of the same name: she loves the chaste Theotormon and desires him, but is raped by Bromion. After the rape, the two males abandon her, and Theotormon subjects the two to a sadistic punishment which is brilliantly visualized in the accompanying illustration. The two male characters are complementary faces of male possessiveness and of an age-old prejudice against sexuality, obscurely veined with Puritanism, and therefore tormented. This ontological personification is explicitly identified by Oothoon in her lament: ‘Urizen! Creator of men! Mistaken Demon of heaven.’ With this, Urizen becomes the centre of Blake’s mythopoeia; his name can easily be interpreted as ‘you reason’, raising him to the level of a symbol of rationalism 28 Bromion is clearly seen as an owner of black slaves. It is superfluous to remind the reader that, only a year before, Mary Wollstonecraft had published her Vindication.

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or of a rationalistic god opposed to imagination – just as the passionate, instinctive spirit of rebellion may be seen in the anagram of that of Orc: there are, here and elsewhere, many other layers of meaning.29 In The First Book of Urizen (1794), the only extant one of a poem in several books, Urizen incarnates the historical misunderstanding of a jealous, spiteful Old Testament creator who dispenses repressive laws, so that the little we have of what was intended to be much longer, turns into an alternative Genesis, rather halfhearted and not very apocalyptic. Urizen gives way to Los, the second or third hypostasis in Blake’s work, Los who suffers and struggles in Promethean imprisonment lasting seven aeons, until, guilty of wishing to take form and materialize, and therefore separate, he gives birth to the female Enitharmon, with whom he copulates. From their union, a worm is formed, which turns into a serpent, and is transformed into a son, Orc, whom we have already seen. His voice raises the dead and a shudder runs through the cosmos. Urizen explores and investigates, and, more and more like the Creator in Genesis, divides the physical world into the four elements of air, water, earth and fire; and, above all, he curses, like Tiriel, his lawless progeny. In the end he imposes a ‘Net’ (institutionalized religion). The First Book of Urizen thus lays down the underlying structure of Blake’s mythological system: everything that follows is comment or gloss, derivation or ramification. 5. Taken down from the words of a fairy, as recounted in the short introduction that precedes the ‘Preludium’, Europe: a Prophecy (1794), tells the story, through the dream of Enitharmon, of 2,000 years of submission to a religion that consists only of prohibition and inhibition, especially in the sexual sphere, as exemplified in four couples of her children, among whom, to give an idea of the richness of the weave of Blake’s saga, is the case of Oothoon and Theotormon. At the same time the forces of counter-revolution sweep all before them, until Los appears on the horizon and spurs his children to resist, and the flames of regeneration spread throughout Europe. In the Book of Ahania30 (1795), Fuzon is one of Urizen’s sons, who – as is by

29 According to the Greek etymology, Urizen is one who draws boundaries (in particular, with regard to energy); visually, he is a blind old man standing in front of the tablets of the ten commandments. 30 Only one published copy exists: Blake was later to incorporate the material from it into The Four Zoas.

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now usual – rebels against his father, proclaims himself a god, but is then nailed to the tree of mystery and lamented by Ahania, Urizen’s bride, who has been cast off because she wanted to teach him the enjoyment of life, the negation of which is Urizen’s very raison d’être. The first section of Song of Los (1795) targets the slave trade and Enlightenment philosophy, with Urizen still representing the god of tyranny and law. The Book of Los (1795) retells the seven days of creation from the point of view of Los. § 177. Blake V: The Prophetic Books Three heftier prophetic books release, when opened, an overwhelming flood of verse: Vala (1797, rewritten with the title The Four Zoas), Milton and Jerusalem (both begun in 1804 and continued in the following years and decades). They form a polyptych, or even a triple rewriting of the same material, and are thought by some critics to contain the finest poetry ever written by Blake – or by any other English poet, and by others to be mediocre, if not downright awful. Blake would often tell his few friends about his plans to write these poems: they would, he said, be worthy of comparison with the great texts of western literature, those by Homer, Dante and Milton. The trouble with this mythopoeia is, without doubt, repetitiveness, in terms of the mythological actors, and their deeds, which are multiplied needlessly31 and would benefit from being severely cut back. It is easy to apply Goethe’s fallacious definition of poetry, and see what is left when poetry is ‘translated into prose’, so that all that is needed is to measure the difference in quantity. The mythological actors are, in reality, mental faculties, psychological attitudes, ideological programmes, or spiritual values or deficiencies according to Blake’s perspective, but rendered anthropomorphic. These may be transparent as paradigms, but are thrust into a syntagmatics which is obscure, complicated and disjointed, something which is conceded even by Blake scholars, one of whom recently observed that ‘readers soon discover that no simple definition of these powers is adequate: they are what they do, and their roles vary according to context’.32 There is no solid, economical thematic chain because the visionary diegesis denies limitations in space and time, and overlaps past, present and future. 31 32

See Pagnini 1994, 20 n. 18. D. Lincoln, in Eaves 2003, 222.

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Everything is a-chronic, and simultaneous and kaleidoscopic; in this sense Blake’s method is archetypal avant lettre, acknowledges post-Sternian aesthetics, and foreshadows techniques to be used by Pound, Eliot and Joyce. Defenders of the three poems add that they are all one open work, to be freely interpreted by each reader, and that it would have been a contradiction if Blake, a fierce adversary of tyranny in all its forms, had imposed his own interpretation. The repeated macrotheme is ‘generation’, in other words, the ‘Fall’ from eternity into a historical dimension, with a deferred return to Eternity through the correction of error. This eschatological journey runs parallel to a political utopia – rather like today’s ‘liberation theology’ – as well as a sexual one: chastity has been imposed by priests, not by Christ, sex is freedom, and female power must be ‘requantified’. What we have is a kind of stereophony with three interwoven planes. 2. Vala and its later form, The Four Zoas,33 are the least organic of the three poems because, in current editions, the text, never completed or printed in Blake’s lifetime, has been edited by overlapping the two versions, so that the complexity coefficient is raised to the power of two. The theological-conceptual plan is the division of the One and the scattering of its elements until they are reunited in the One. The creating principle is still Urizen, who ‘emanates’, but who, as soon as he has emanated, sees the arrival of rivals and enemies, and wages war against what are emanations and hypostases of himself. Each mythic actor has a ‘ghost’, which is the negative, demonic version of himself, giving rise to a psychomachia. While Urizen builds his palace, imposes his laws and, with them, contaminates the world, Los and Enitharmon, engaged in furious battles against their enemies, celebrate their wedding, and from the Council of the Eternals comes the

33

In the unfallen state, Vala is love, and in the fallen state, nature that triumphs over spirit. Her name is thought to be almost homophonous with ‘veil’, alluding to the veil of matter that covers reality. Albion is also called Tharmas and represents the salutary unity of perception, which has since been lost. Los is Urthona in Eternity; Urizen is Satan; Orc is also Luvah. Los, Orc, Urizen and Tharmas are the four Zoas modelled on the four figures – eagle, lion, ox and man – at the throne of the Lamb in Revelation. The poem is structured as a dream lasting nine nights, possibly echoing Young’s Night Thoughts, which Blake was illustrating at the time.

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decision regarding the future advent of Christ. The incessant civilizing action of Los, a smith whose work with hammer and anvil is described almost lovingly by Blake, is directed at the construction of Golgonooza, a completely different city to that of Urizen. Much of the poem is a second ‘book of Urizen’, the god who curses his children and claims and obtains compassion. War, always on the point of breaking out between the two Metaphysical rivals, Urizen and Los, does at last explode, but we do not know what the conclusion will be, as the poem ends here. Urizen has guessed that Los is a kind of John the Baptist and heralds the Lamb born from the bosom of Jerusalem. The poem ends suddenly at harvest time, with only the possibility of reconciliation in the universe. 3. The iconoclastic preface to Milton (1804–1810) contrasts the biblical sublime, to be treasured by the age to come, with the poetry of Homer and Ovid. Shakespeare and Milton, too, were lessened by their imitation of classical poetry. All art is ‘depressed’, directed, that is, to the wrong channels by the demands of a market that rewards servile imitation – and Blake invites the reader to reconsider the destructive message of the Bible. The poem in four quatrains that follows the preface,34 is based on the theory or legend that Christ’s earthly journey took place in England, and that he, a shepherd, grazed his flocks in English pastures. Jerusalem was edified there among the satanic mills. The poet’s only task is to take up the traditional tools of the prophet in order to announce it, ready to engage in war, albeit conceptual: Jerusalem must be placed there, in a reconstructed England. Blake said that the heart of the poem (in two books) was dictated to him by Milton himself, who entered his body through his left foot; the preannounced objective was to correct Milton’s errors, the first of which was to affirm that sex was enjoyed only after and because of the Fall (which, only in this case, is the banishing of Adam and Eve from Eden). Or rather: Milton believed, fearful as he was of the irrationality of sex, that the seat of love and the sexual urge was reason; in other words, he mistook God for Urizen.35 The palinode grows, thanks to the meeting between Milton and Ololon, the spirit of truth, the spiritual form of his emanations and the 34 Later also called ‘Jerusalem’. 35 Blake of course has Milton declare that he has cast off Bacon, Locke and Newton.

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life blood of rediscovered and regenerated sexuality.36 The final objective is the same, the rejection of rationalistic, or natural, religion, always anathema to Blake; and at the same time the re-birth of the Church, especially in England,37 through a reunification of the transitory with the eternal; in other words, Jerusalem must rise once more in Albion. 4. With Jerusalem (written and illustrated between 1804 and 1820)38 Blake was conscious and proud of having written a masterpiece. But is it indeed so much better than his other works? The difference lies in the anthropomorphization of geography and orography in the poem: the characters are also places with their history – humanized places – and the giant, Albion, is the first man, but also, by tradition, England. Blake always mixes the mythic with the everyday, and his repertoire of characters includes the oaf, Schofield, who had slandered him, and who is included among the degenerate sons of Albion. When they cease being paradigmatic, the allegories become real flesh and blood figures who give voice to lamentations and arias. Jerusalem, freedom and peace, is a broken-spirited sinner,

36

37 38

This meeting is perhaps the most memorable example of the descent of the mythological-visionary into the everyday-existential in the whole of Blake, and is imagined as taking place in the garden in Felpham where Blake stayed with Hayley for three years. Critics are not wide of the mark when they attribute to Blake the Dissenter a kind of nostalgic longing for the Anglican Church. See on this Paananen 1996, 3. The most consistent and detailed of Blake’s cycles of illustrations, the hundred etchings of Jerusalem were made around 1820 (the originals are in New Haven, CT). The dominant colours are brick red and orange; the human and supernatural figures are represented in twisted poses, with wind-tossed hair; they are whirled around as in a storm, or sitting hunched as if dreaming, or praying, or despairing. Their vertebrae are marked and prominent, as are muscles and sinews. In the foreground, the faces are equally well-delineated, with swollen lips, enormous limbs and unproportionally huge toes. The bodies appear to be permanently tensed, as if holding back an energy that is ready to explode. The signs of Michelangelo’s contribution to the study of anatomy are unmistakeable, but Mantegna is there, too, and the Giulio Romano of the frescoes in Palazzo Tè in Mantua. In many cases, the background depicts arid landscapes, flaming fires and blinding lights. In illustration no. 37 an enormous bat is about to attack a woman lying on her back and dreaming, and an old man prepares to shoot a dart from a shell. In the foreground, a woman has her head between her knees, and, by her side, a rolled-up parchment.

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steeped in Sehnsucht, a mother and rival often in the grip of despair. Los is true to himself, a sturdy follower of good, and a custodian of principles, a symbol of the smithy with his anvil and hammer. Once again, the danger lies in cosmic disintegration. Man has lost contact with God, and is divided within himself, but Blake is certain that a reunification of the separated parts is possible. A second axis, the argument, or one of the arguments, of the poem is the passionate subscription to a faith based on forgiveness rather than on revenge or egoism. A third axis is once again the rejection of the three-headed spectre of Rousseau, Newton and Locke. The final objective is the symbolic re-awakening of England from the sleep of death, and the return to a mythic time when Jerusalem rose on English soil. § 178. Wordsworth* I: The dialogue of the soul with itself in the presence of nature1 It would have been incongruous on the part of William Wordsworth (1770–1850) if, made famous by the Lyrical Ballads, he had decided to *

Poetical works ed. E. de Selincourt and H. Derbyshire, 5 vols, Oxford 1940–1949; The Prelude is edited separately by the same scholars, Oxford 1926 and 1959. Both editions have now been superseded by The Cornell Wordsworth, ed. S. M. Parrish, 21 vols, Ithaca, NY 1975–2007. Collected prose ed. W. J. B. Owen and J. W. Smyser, 3 vols, London 1974; Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. C. L. Shaver, 8 vols, Oxford 1967–1993. Journals by Dorothy Wordsworth ed. M. Moorman, London 1971. Life. E. Legouis, The Early Life of William Wordsworth, 1770–1798, Eng. trans., London 1897; E. Batho, The Later Wordsworth, Cambridge 1933; M. Moorman, Wordsworth: A Biography, 2 vols, Oxford 1957–1965; H. Davies, William Wordsworth: A Biography, London 1980; F. B. Pinion, A Wordsworth Chronology, Boston, MA 1988; S. Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life, Oxford 1989; K. R. Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy, New York and London 1992; J. Barker, Wordsworth: A Life, London 2000; D. Wu, Wordsworth: An Inner Life, Oxford 2002; J. Worthen, The Life of William Wordsworth: A Critical Biography, Chichester 2014. Criticism. H. Read, Wordsworth, London 1930; H. Darbyshire, The Poet Wordsworth, Oxford 1950;  The Critical Opinions of William Wordsworth, ed. M. Peacock, Jr, Baltimore, MD 1950; L. Abercrombie, The Art of Wordsworth, London 1952; F. W. Bateson, Wordsworth: A Reinterpretation, London 1956; D. Ferry, The Limits of Mortality: An Essay on Wordsworth’s Major Poems, Middletown, CT 1959; M.

1

I owe this title to Geoffrey Hartman.

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Pagnini, La poesia di W. Wordsworth, Milano 1959; J. F. Danby, The Simple Wordsworth: Studies in the Poems 1797–1807, London 1960; H. Lindenberger, On Wordsworth’s ‘Prelude’, Princeton, NJ 1963, 1976; D. Perkins, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Sincerity, Cambridge, MA 1964; C. Woodring, Wordsworth, Boston, MA 1965; G. H. Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814, London 1964, and The Unremarkable Wordsworth, London 1987; W. J. B. Owen, Wordsworth as Critic, Toronto 1969; J. Wordsworth, The Music of Humanity: A Critical Study of Wordsworth’s ‘Ruined Cottage’, London 1969; J. R. Curtis, Wordsworth’s Experiments with Tradition: The Lyric Poems of 1802, Ithaca, NY 1971; R. J. Onorato, The Character of the Poet: Wordsworth in The Prelude, Princeton, NJ 1971; Wordsworth: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. M. H. Abrams, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1972; S. M. Parrish, The Art of the ‘Lyrical Ballads’, Cambridge, MA 1973; P. D. Sheats, The Making of Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1785–1798, Cambridge, MA 1973; F. Ferguson, Wordsworth: Language as Counter Spirit, New Haven, CT 1977; M. Jacobus, Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth’s ‘Lyrical Ballads’ 1798, Oxford 1978; J. H. Averill, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Human Suffering, Ithaca, NY 1980; D. H. Bialostosky, Making Tales: The Poetics of Wordsworth’s Narrative Experiments, Chicago, IL 1984, and Wordsworth, Dialogics and the Practice of Criticism, Cambridge 1992; J. K. Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics, Chicago, IL and London 1984; K. R. Johnston, Wordsworth and ‘The Recluse’, New Haven, CT 1984; William Wordsworth’s ‘The Prelude’, and William Wordsworth, both ed. H. Bloom, New York 1986 and New York 2009; M. Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems: Four Essays, Cambridge 1986; S. J. Wolfson, The Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Interrogative Mode in Romantic Poetry, Ithaca, NY 1986; The Age of William Wordsworth, ed. K. R. Johnston and G. W. Ruoff, New Brunswick and London 1987; D. Simpson, Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination, New York 1987; T. Kelly, Wordsworth’s Revisionary Aesthetics, Cambridge 1988; N. Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years, Oxford 1988; E. Stein, Wordsworth’s Art of Allusion, University Park, PA 1988; A. J. Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment: Nature, Man, and Society in the Experimental Poetry, New Haven, CT 1989; J. Williams, Wordsworth: Romantic Poetry and Revolution Politics, Manchester 1989, also editor of Wordsworth, Basingstoke 1993, and author of William Wordsworth: A Literary Life, Basingstoke 1996; W. H. Galperin, Revision and Authority in Wordsworth: The Interpretation of a Career, Philadelphia, PA 1989; A. Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History, Palo Alto, CA 1989; G. H. Gilpin, Critical Essays on William Wordsworth, Boston, MA 1990; T. McFarland, William Wordsworth: Intensity and Achievement, Oxford 1992; CRHE, ed. R. Woof, 2 vols, London 2001; The Cambridge Companion to William Wordsworth, ed. S. Gill, Cambridge 2003, also author of Wordsworth’s Revisitings, Oxford 2011; I. Reid, Wordsworth and the Formation of English Studies, Aldershot 2004; S. Jarvis, Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song, Cambridge 2007; D. Simpson, Wordsworth, Commodification and Social Concern, Cambridge 2009.

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move to London after 1798: was he not, after all, the ‘Lake poet’, the poet of nature, who sang of the inestimable benefits, both psychological and symbolic, of the countryside as against the town? Furthermore, residing in the ‘monster city’ would have been a contradiction, given his life-long ambition to write a poem of vast dimensions, to be entitled, significantly, The Recluse. Consistency – others have called it ‘sincerity’,2 or self-command – is the or a distinguishing mark of Wordsworth, man and poet. Yet, the withdrawal from the world to the ‘golden cage’ of Nature is more apparent than real in Wordsworth, who far from being a crusty, sedentary misanthropist, was a sociable man who valued friendship: he was also a tireless explorer, and, above all, a great hiker, who went on many walking tours at home and on the Continent. Another of his traits was curiosity, a lively interest in human beings: he never tired of meeting people, especially the poor folk of the countryside; he would strike up a conversation with them, which usually started by asking, as he did of the leech-gatherer: ‘How is it that you live, and what is it you do?’ If his dynamism appears inferior to that of his fellow-Romantics, this is because he lived until he was eighty; but the first thirty years of his life were frenetic – almost a carbon copy of the life of the other English Romantics. As we shall see, Wordsworth might well have died young, either through natural causes, or violently. On the basis of his famous axiom that ‘the child is father to the man’, let us look briefly at a few salient facts of his life. He was born in one of England’s most symbolic, legendary beauty spots, the Lake District. The mother of the five Wordsworth children died when William was eight, and the father, a lawyer and estate administrator, when the poet was thirteen. He was brought up by relatives. Possibly owing to the early loss of both parents, he grew up solitary and morose; at first he gave release to his most aggressive, destructive instincts3 in an all-out wrestling-match with the world around him, but gradually discovered the calm, silent message inherent in Nature, so that he would periodically open his heart in front of her simulacra. After attending a reputable grammar school not far from home, Wordsworth went to 2 3

Perkins 1964. Also erotic-anal impulses, as in the poem, ‘Nutting’, in which the child sets off with a phallic hook and large bag and literally deflowers nature in the course of his expedition.

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Cambridge, destined for a career in the church. He left with a mediocre degree in 1791. At the end of that year, informed his relatives that he was no longer sure of his religious vocation, and wished to find employment as a private tutor. In order to perfect his French, he managed to convince his family to finance a journey to France, where he arrived in November 1791. By now intoxicated by the ideals of revolution, hostile to the established Church, and sympathizing with the Girondins, if he had remained in France he would have been guillotined like the poet, André Chénier. Instead, he returned to England in December 1792, the father of a daughter born of his affair with Annette Vallon, whose family were Catholic royalists. This was the most unlikely thing that could happen to someone who was anything but a libertine.4 Subsequently, Wordsworth did recognize his daughter, and contemplated a reparatory marriage, which, however, never took place. His feeling of guilt never quite abandoned him, just as the first-hand experience of the French Revolution continued to haunt him throughout his life.5 4

5

This ‘hidden’ Wordsworth came to light only in 1916. Scandalistic biographies have capitalized on the revelations, and Johnston 1992 went so far as to suggest that Wordsworth habitually made use of prostitutes, that, when in France, he spied for the English government, and that he verged on an incestuous relationship with his sister. All these speculations have since been refuted, especially by Barker 2000. Wordsworth himself, speaking in the Prelude of this second journey to France in 1791, glossed over the episode, replacing it, allusively, with an account of the blighted love of Vaudracour and Julia (§ 182): for love of the woman, who is about to give birth to his child, but whom he cannot marry because of his class, Vaudracour ends up in prison. Once out, he still cannot marry her, and lives a wretched life in the vicinity. The girl gives birth, and Vaudracour takes the new-born child to his home, but is thrown out by his father. He is given a hut in the wood, where the child dies. Vaudracour becomes a recluse. Religious prejudices and the concept pithily expressed by the Italian proverb, ‘mogli e buoi dei paesi tuoi’ (‘your wife, like your livestock, should be of the same nationality as you’), dissuaded Wordsworth from marrying a French Catholic. Feminist criticism has been implacable in criticizing his behaviour (including the meagre allowance made to mother and daughter). Spivak 1987, one of whose chapters is included in Williams 1993, 172–87, points out the sexist approach of critics writing before the advent of feminism.

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His enthusiasm for the Revolution was dampened when the Terror struck and France began to put into practice its expansionist ambitions. Many of these facts were incorporated in the poems he wrote, by metonymy or synecdoche, for example in the large number of references to female tramps, or mad women, or widows. In 1795, he settled in Racedown, Dorset, with his sister, Dorothy, who from that time on became his faithful companion, muse and secretary. 2. The most important event in his life before 1798 was his meeting with Coleridge and the beginning of an undying friendship. Before that date, Wordsworth appears to be complementary, above all, to Blake, and continues to be so at least until the early 1790s, when their paths separate definitively. Blake was a real Londoner, and Wordsworth, a Northerner, had spent only a few months in the capital and never actually met Blake, even if he had wanted to. Wordsworth’s father was a lawyer, Blake’s a shopkeeper; Wordsworth was ‘only’ a poet, unlike the multi-faceted and eclectic Blake. Wordsworth, we have seen, went to university, while Blake was largely selftaught. They were, however, united by their relationship with the world of Dissent: though not linked by exactly the same kind of Dissent, both were attracted by the radicalism of Paine and Godwin. The beginnings of their respective careers were similar in that both were tempted to write a tragedy; furthermore, both started off immediately by using extremely clear, simple language and taking the figure of the child as a symbol of a return to a state of innocence. City-dweller Blake escaped whenever he could to the countryside, to restore his strength and spirits in the world of nature, a world that had been cradle, sustenance and refuge for Wordsworth since he was a babe. All the English Romantics dreamt of regeneration, of course, but Blake and Wordsworth were, of all of them, the most infatuated with the real possibility that the French Revolution could bring down the status quo and inaugurate a new universal regime of freedom. On this hope the two are as one. Wordsworth went to France twice, just after the beginning of the Revolution; Blake was even more taken by it, though he never left England; to make up for not going there in person, he wrote a poem entitled The French Revolution. After the turn of the century, the differences between the two poets became unbridgeable, both because Blake

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embraced the oratio obliqua of prophecy while Wordsworth focused on simplicity and clarity (he kept himself at a distance from theosophy and the esoteric), and because Blake remained faithful to his ideals of spiritual and political reform, while Wordsworth, in a sense, abjured his faith in revolution and in its place gave his backing to a programme of timid conservative reforms. This is why, when Wordsworth read Blake’s poems, he could not give his full approval; this was reciprocated by Blake’s lukewarm reaction to Wordsworth’s verses. 3. In the context of English literature, not only of the Romantic period, Wordsworth holds the title of ‘poet’ by antonomasia. He left no appreciable prose works, with the exception of the prefaces to the Lyrical Ballads, he was not a literary critic or expert in aesthetics, nor did he have any expertise in non-verbal arts. He did, indeed, make comments on poets past and contemporary, but these he inserted in his poems. Now and then he translated from classical authors, but he could not be defined a classicist. He dedicates little space to mythology. Above all, he lacks the very quality the English are renowned for – a sense of humour. What he does possess to the highest degree is the characteristic of the poet forever communing with himself. He was aware of this, and admitted to, and forgave himself for being the poet who had spoken the most about himself. Keats echoed him, and coined the phrase the ‘egotistical sublime’. Wordsworth wrote and perfected, often repeating himself, the story of his spiritual development. The mechanism of sensation is articulated in three stages: the young poet, child or boy, ‘feels’ intensely in the presence of nature, and becomes part of the whole; the adult, now a poet, remembers and recreates the sensation without experiencing the shock and shivers of the original; the emotion is different, calmer, and more stable because it is accompanied by ‘the sad music of humanity’. However, one who turns to nature depressed, dejected and disappointed may be uplifted by remembered joy. The third stage is when the poet writes of the ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’. In line with Hartley, Wordsworth postulated that the intellect is not passive, but capable of organization, though, later, the threat of passivity and mental instability returns. Geoffrey Hartman’s intuition that, in Wordsworth, intellect acts as ‘consciousness within consciousness’ seems to be quite brilliant. On an aesthetic level, Wordsworth’s poetry works successfully when

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this three-stage process or mechanism becomes two-stage, when, that is, the poet is exempted, or exempts himself from explaining how the second ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ acts and what it adds to the first stage; it is better, therefore, for poetry to transcribe tersely, without comment, the emotion and shock caused by a single epiphanic flash (provided by the sight of a butterfly, cuckoo, lark or primrose). Ever since Empson, critics have pointed out the unthinkable: that Wordsworth was a poet who used stratified, multi-faceted language, and attempted to display and did in fact make use of a kind of poetry made up of ‘onomatopoeic moments’ and ‘articulating mixtures’.6 On the contrary, in the long poems, and in the shorter narrative ones, Wordsworth often trips up.7 4. There is, in Wordsworth, a third ‘consciousness within consciousness’; he is one of the best examples of a poet endowed with a feeling of reverence and awe for his own work. This Narcissus cult does have a practical side, though. He was both creator and editor-agent-administrator of his creations. For a start, he knew when to publish and when not to. For fifty years he kept his life’s masterwork under wraps, and died without publishing it – deliberately, one might say (but he did write three, if not four different versions of the same). He brought out three editions of the Lyrical Ballads, carefully revised in keeping with the changing historical context of the period 1798–1802. Few writers can match him in his ceaseless correction and fine-tuning of a work which, he knew, would become the image of the age. Such was his intention and ambition. He held back and refrained from publishing many other works which, over the years, he continued to polish and perfect. Like a testamentary executor, he compiled

6 7

Cf. Gill 2003, 152, and his references. This is the diagnosis proposed by Arnold, whose essay is later than Pater’s, by and large along the same lines. Cf. in this regard Volume 6, § 34.5 (on Arnold) and § 185.2 (on Pater, where he examines Wordsworth’s relation to the Pantheist tradition). Pagnini 1959 distinguishes those cases in which an Eliotian ‘transfiguration’ takes place of the original emotion or passion into words; he concludes that when the philosophical thought is not transferred to the poetry in the form of symbol, it fails, since allegory and direct statement are inadequate in poetic terms. Wordsworth was no Donne, and in him thought and feeling rarely, if ever, reach a perfect amalgam.

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a list of his works based on an unusual organizing principle, not chronological but thematic (later editors were forced to revert to a chronological sequencing of his works). It is indicative of Wordsworth’s editorial system that it contains no mention of the Lyrical Ballads as such, the very book that changed the course of English poetry; he dismantled it and distributed the various poems into different categories. So, Wordsworth himself dictated the terms in which his works were to be read by future generations. The synchronic rather than diachronic organization of a corpus suggests an attempt to influence the unfolding of history and its repercussions. So it is ironic that when he was still at the beginning of his career, he was bombarded by vitriolic reviews inspired by old-fashioned Augustan parameters, in which he was accused of being a radical and Jacobin, and the author of sickening and sugary verses. After 1842, the role of leading English poet in the eyes of the public was taken over by Tennyson; by Arnold’s day, Wordsworth was almost unknown on the Continent. Before 1850, most readers were unaware that he had been working on The Prelude, so that contemporary assessment was based on the Lyrical Ballads, the later collections, and the most important poems contained in them. The term ‘Lake Poets’ as applied to Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey was, at first, derogatory. With the exception of Tennyson, the poets of the following generation all looked kindly on the various libertarian ideologies, and could not forgive Wordsworth for abandoning the revolutionary dream and embracing conservatism. In 1844, Browning wrote a poem alluding to a ‘duke’ who had deserted his fellow-soldiers for ‘a handful of silver coins’, a reference to the pension Wordsworth received, in 1843, as Poet Laureate. The English Biedermeier, the relaxed form of Romanticism after 1815, spread from Wordsworth to essayists like De Quincey and Lamb; in the longer term, Wordsworth was to be appreciated by the English for moral rather than poetic reasons. After 1950, an interest in the question of poetic identity and theories of poetic language, plus the debate on ideology and even ecological issues, led to a huge revival in Wordsworth studies.8

8

Gill 2003, 1.

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§ 179. Wordsworth II: The ‘loco-descriptive poems’ The first poems by Wordsworth worthy of mention,9 An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches, are in heroic couplets, and were published by Johnson of London, the same courageous publisher that had printed Blake’s early works and those of Mary Wollstonecraft. We might recall that the term ‘sketches’ had already been used – by chance or deliberately – in the title of Blake’s first published work, with a thematic parallelism, given that ‘descriptive’ and ‘poetical’ were more or less synonymous. The first of the two poems consists of a number of scenes and views pertaining to the Lake District, with repeated chiaroscuro effects, in the evening, before the rising of the moon. The text is full of geographical names that are to become cardinal points later, and establishes the classic Wordsworthian situation of the evening or night walk, and the search for a solitary corner deep in the country. The word-painting is elaborate, and some individual lines display a studied use of onomatopoeia (‘And all the babbling brooks are liquid gold’). Equally anticipatory is the meeting with the vagrant who arouses pity in the wayfarer. An Evening Walk was written in 1788, while Descriptive Sketches was composed in France in 1792, and refers to a walking tour in the Alps made with his fellow-student, Robert Jones. In the latter, too, we find some fundamental themes, like wandering up hill and down dale, through woods and thickets, and crossing ever babbling brooks; or the meeting with an old man, and the guided visit to a cottage. At the Great Chartreuse, the ancient silence is broken by the din of Revolution. A gypsy woman holds a child to her breast, and an old hermit is a musician. Goldsmith’s Switzerland, too, was the closest one could get to an earthly paradise, and the symbol of perfect liberty.10 The poem ends, in fact, with a hymn to freedom, after the rumble of war and riots of Paris have shattered the quiet. The Borderers (a tragedy set at the time of Henry III and the Crusades, published in 1842 in a revised edition, but completed in 1797), one of many Romantic attempts to emulate Shakespeare, has a plot loosely and limply based on King Lear. On the border between 9 10

Guilt and Sorrow, the other pre-1795 medium-length poem, incorporates material which, when extrapolated, became ‘The Female Vagrant’ (§ 180.2 n. 13). § 113.4.

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England and Scotland, Oswald, a kind of Godwinian Superman, tries to induce a weak Marmaduke to murder an old baron blinded during the siege of Antioch; but his hand is blocked as he is about to strike, when he sees, in the face of the victim, the image of his daughter, Idonea, whom he loves, and also when he spies through a chink in the dungeon wall the twinkling of a star. The crime is committed, anyway, the baron being left to die on the heath. Quite original are features like the ‘female vagrant’ who says she is the mother of Idonea and slanders the old man only to repent when it is too late; and, above all, the baron’s morbid dependence on his daughter. Here, too, a possible parallel might be made with Blake, whose first prophetic book presents the wanderings of an Ossianic Tiriel accompanied by his daughter, Hela. In The Borderers, the political situation is as chaotic, stormy and anarchic as the real-life upheaval in contemporary France, but the restoration of the status quo is near, thanks to good King Henry. Ideologically speaking, the tragedy is the vaccination of Godwinism. Oswald attempts, against his nature, to live according to reason and logic, believing, as in Dostoevsky, that he is immune from punishment; but discover the limits of his philosophy he must and will. The debate between the two heroes is fierce. In the end, Oswald is killed by the gang of outlaws, while Marmaduke, like Coleridge’s Mariner, is doomed to expiate his sin by wandering here, there and everywhere, without rest. The embarrassment and crisis of Wordsworth in the mid-1790s emerge clearly in a letter to the conservative bishop of Llandaff, written from a very radical point of view, and including a justification of regicide; the letter was never sent, and was published only in 1876. Wordsworth distanced himself from Godwin, but without following the direction taken by Blake; instead, he turned his attention to Hartley, who contested innatism and argued for an associativism which established a connection between sensory impressions and simple ideas. § 180. Wordsworth III: ‘Lyrical Ballads’ In 1795 Wordsworth, came into a small inheritance left to him by a generous friend; thanks to this, he was able, if he was careful in his spending, to become a full-time poet. The same year marks the beginning of his friendship with Coleridge; it was in order to be near this new friend that

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Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy,11 left their native Lake District and moved south, to Alfoxden, where the constant, fervid exchange of ideas between the two poets gave birth to the Lyrical Ballads. Contemporary readers did not know which of the two was the author of the individual poems in the first edition, published in 1798, and probably thought the poems were the fruit of collaboration, like a number of well-known Elizabethan plays. Only in the Preface to the second edition (1800), perfected in the third (1802) and in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, were they informed who had written which poems. In mutual accord, Wordsworth dealt with aspects of everyday life using a plain style, as close as possible to the reality he was describing; Coleridge’s sphere was the presence of the supernatural in everyday life. The distinction, or tension, is not, as in Blake, between innocence and experience, but between natural and supernatural, or verifiable reality and dreaming. The prefaces clarified other programmatic intentions of the authors, and constitute a blueprint of a revolutionary ars poetica. Critics talked very early of the anagrammatic significance of the dates 1789 and 1798, and of a ‘taking of the Bastille’ in English literature. Ideologically, the Lyrical Ballads are a repudiation of Godwin and the beginning of a palingenetic dream of spiritual reform of the individual and society. The subjects of the poems are taken from everyday country life, the only environment capable of bringing out the basic, eternal passions and urges of the human being. Poetry is defined as the ‘spontaneous overflowing of powerful feelings’, meaning both primeval feelings and the moral intent of the author aimed at the illumination and edification of the reader. Above all, there was an urgent need to reform a national literature which was seen as decadent and dominated by ‘foreign fashions’ and a debilitating taste for sensationalism. Lastly, the authors proposed an outright revolution in poetic language, with a total rejection of Augustan poetic diction. So, not only the subject matter had to change: the language of poetry had to become less ‘poetic’ and more like prose. Poetry was called ‘well-turned prose with the addition – not essential – of

11

She is said to have given up the possibility of marriage in order to devote herself to her brother; their relationship has often been seen as ‘morbid’.

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metre’. Wordsworth’s linguistic ‘truth to life’ was approximate, and did not include the local dialect, or a total, or even partial, rendering of the personal idiosyncrasies of an individual’s speech. In the case of the ‘female vagrant’, Wordsworth notes in passing that, from a young age, the woman had read all the books she could lay her hands on. The other peasants and shepherds speak in a kind of ‘ballad’ style English. 2. The principal personification of the poet in the Lyrical Ballads is an inquisitive, empathetic wayfarer, who questions the people he meets, especially those he sees crying or in pain or distress, people with a spiritual burden or, as is often the case, the weight of remorse, who need release or relief, and are encouraged to speak of their troubles by the listener, who is, of course, the poet himself. In several cases, the poem originates in a chance meeting or ‘overlapping’ in that it is the poet, secretly oppressed by some mental torment, who seeks comfort in the same solitary natural setting in which his interlocutor, too, has taken refuge. The geographical scene of action of the poems is an area of field, valleys and coasts recently touched by some unnamed crisis – possibly the collateral effects of the French Revolution – which has put an end to a period of stagnant prosperity. Much more realistic, though still illusory, are the titles that indicate the time and place of several poems, and that were sometimes taken for parodies. The opening poem of the Lyrical Ballads informs the reader, in its title, that the following verses were found abandoned on a seat carved out in the trunk of a yew tree, in a kind of three-line, free-verse stanza which acts as a ‘miniature’ of the poem. The thorn, too, in the lyric of the same name, has been measured precisely; in another, Wordsworth the wanderer carries an eyeglass. Families are always split, the husband missing, dead or in prison, leaving his children fatherless. A shepherd had fifty sheep, but now is pictured bewailing the last of the flock, the others having been sold off one by one to allow him and his family to survive. Wordsworth is a sentimentalizing radical who does not thunder against the system from an orange box or electoral platform: he shows us the harm done by the law, and presents scenes that should shake the reader’s apathy and make him call out for reform in various fields, like, for example, the prisons.12 The 12

A poem with the explicit title, ‘To a prisoner’, was not deemed worthy to be printed, and was dropped from the second edition. ‘The Thorn’ includes the story of a woman

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rhetoric is hardly perceptible, but halfway through ‘Simon Lee’ Wordsworth admits – rather like Fielding – that the reader may expect a story, and he will get one, and so an anecdote begins to emerge, plain though it be; but he would look in vain for something shocking or highly unusual here: the events recounted are ordinary happenings of everyday life. The wayfarer meets someone on the way, and this meeting gives rise to a monologue which is either referred to and enclosed in a framework, or recited without accompanying comments. There is no lack of stories or biographical anecdotes, or tales of inexorable decline from a state of happiness and abundance,13 or, alternatively, ballads and fables featuring stylized figures and a small dose of relieved humour.14 The subdued, neutral style implies a correspondingly halting, sloppy diction; the work of a hypothetical poet trying out his wings, in which parataxis is predominant and metaphorism almost zero: openings like that of ‘Anecdote for Fathers’ sound like parodies. Meetings of a different kind, especially with children, and of fathers with children, read like a criticism of rationalism and a corroboration of perceptivism and associative intuitionism. In ‘Anecdote for Fathers’ the father, deep in thought,

13

14

who has been jilted, at the altar, by the man who has made her pregnant (note the autobiographical reference); driven by a mechanism of psychological compensation, which must be viewed with some indulgence, the woman kills the new-born child and buries it by the mountain thorn bush, the colours of which include red, the colour of blood. The stationary figure of the mother mourning at the spot where her child is buried anticipates that of the ‘solitary reaper’. The thorn takes on a talismanic valency and magically blocks the villagers who are out to punish her for her crime. Devotion and honesty are the distinguishing features of the protagonist of ‘The Female Vagrant’. Her Eden has been violated by a wicked, avaricious squire who evicts her father and her. She marries a local man, and they have children; the father dies, and his place is taken by poverty. After various difficulties, the woman, plagued by nightmares of sickness and war, seems to find peace on her way back to England. A parallel odyssey is described in ‘The Mad Mother’. The anecdotal ballads are ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’ (the thieving girl is caught in the act of stealing kindling wood from the cruel Harry Gill, who meets with fitting punishment) and ‘The Idiot Boy’, another study in mental illness and infantile Daltonism, be it normal or pathological, like that of the little girl in ‘We are seven’: the owls are cockerels and the moon is taken for the sun. A kind of miracle takes place at the end when Susan Gale, as in the Gospel, gets up and sets off in search of Betty and Johnny.

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demands his son to rationally justify a spontaneous observation; in the end the child gives him an answer which is impertinent and capricious. In ‘We are seven’, the child applies a principle of reality which is different to that of the adult, who admits he has much to learn from her. ‘Lines written in early spring’, too, studies abstraction, and the way, from relaxing thoughts, other ‘sad’ thoughts may come. The brusque ending seems to suggest that man has worsened his predicament when compared with the peace of nature.15 Nature, and how it effects the human psyche through memory, is the subject of the final poem in the collection, ‘Tintern Abbey’. 3. ‘Tintern Abbey’ winds and wanders like the river Wye itself, with sentences joined by conjunctions that move the argument along. Wordsworth begins by telling us that he has just visited, after an absence of five years, one of those places that have a special connection with heaven. Tintern is in Wales, and the experience referred to is an excursion made there in 1793. The benefits of the peace and quiet of the spot have seen him through the intervening five years of din and bustle of the city: his whole being – heart, soul and mind – has been filled with an almost unconscious love of his fellow-creatures and a desire to do good. A further, impalpable benefit is the process by which all contact with contingent reality fades, the consciousness becomes ‘a living soul’, and the weight of the mystery of living is lifted from the shoulders. What is being described is, obviously, a kind of transcendental experience, in which the veil of reality is lifted and the essence of things perceived in all its clarity. Hamletic tones are underlined by the adjective, ‘unprofitable’, alluding to the existential crisis of the poet, the ‘fardel’ that weighs him down, and the torture that is life (this is one of the few, really effective, textual loans in Wordsworth). After pausing to remember those moments, years before, when he came into contact with this place, and felt a rush of emotion, the third stage is the realization that, though the time of enjoyment of nature has passed, yet, in looking at nature, the poet hears the ‘sweet, sad music of humanity’, a music that is not rough or harsh, but soft enough to conquer and appease our suffering. This stage

15

The unambiguous words are: ‘we murder to dissect’; in other words, we kill when we act using only the intellect rather than the imagination.

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is the last, supreme one, in which a disquieting joy is felt, that seems to be a new awareness of the mystery of the universe, a unified cosmos where all is interconnected. ‘Tintern Abbey’ signs and seals a gift of vision that takes in everything – the pros and the cons, the black and the white, in a kind of chiaroscuro study of life. The coda of the poem comes back down to earth and pays homage to his sister. In the second edition (1800), to which the famous ‘Preface’ was added, several new poems by Wordsworth were included, while others were omitted. ‘The Ancient Mariner’ was relegated from first place to the penultimate position, so that practically the whole stage belonged to the man from Cockermouth. § 181. Wordsworth IV: The major phase In 1798 Wordsworth, Coleridge and their coterie were looked upon with suspicion at Alfoxden, in a climate of psychosis caused by mounting fear of a French invasion; a government spy was sent to follow the movements of the supposed Jacobin cell. Prudence advised leaving the area, and Wordsworth and Coleridge decided to go to Germany. Biographers have failed to identify the real reason Wordsworth and Dorothy hid out for several months in the German town of Goslar, in the middle of nowhere. When they returned to England in April 1799, they took a cottage in Grasmere, in the Lake District. We know for certain that Wordsworth and Annette Vallon decided, of common accord, not to marry. Wordsworth married, instead, a childhood friend, Mary Hutchinson, and the couple had several sons and daughters. Coleridge emigrated for a while to Malta for health reasons; one of Wordsworth’s beloved brothers drowned in a shipwreck. At the turn of the century, the poet composed some sonnets against slavery (‘To Toussaint l’Ouverture’), attacking the French decree to expatriate black Africans, and a very bitter one against corruption in England in which he invokes the spirit of Milton. Wordsworth’s shift towards political conservatism became tangible in his tract on The Convention of Cintra (1809), in which he aligned himself with the political tradition that stemmed from Burke. In 1818 he campaigned for the Tories; in 1829 and 1832 he could only observe with dismay the emancipation of Catholics and the passing of the First Reform Bill. The so-called ‘great decade’, from 1798 to 1807, stands out from the following years and, in fact, from the remaining

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years of Wordsworth’s career, which is characterized by a visible decline in poetic quality and a drying up of his inspiration. The ‘great decade’ was an interim period brimful of completed poems, while his life’s work, The Prelude, waited to be finished; but he did start work on The Recluse. His poetic production in these ten years following the Lyrical Ballads may give the impression of a confused jumble, the only structure being given by the actual publication of some collections, the first of which, in two volumes, appeared in 1807 (and was panned by the critics, to Wordsworth’s great chagrin). The poet segmented his poetic production; he wrote for the moment, and at the same time worked on his monumental, ‘epic’ poem.16 In reality, he wrote a huge amount but postponed publication sine die, or did not publish at all, checked by uncharacteristic fears and morbid hesitation. The only classification possible is that of anecdotal poems based on the fortuitous meeting with some ‘rural’ character (often leading to reflections of an ethical nature) and others, which are more difficult to pin down and are often of a theoretical nature. The former tell, in flowing blank verse (otherwise reminiscent of Crabbe, who is there in the background, though) the stories, true or half-imagined, of dour wrestlers in the battle of life who succumb to hardship and human failings (Wordsworth as determinist pessimist?). The encounters between poet and fellow-humans ascend from the contingent to the absolute, and lead to reflections on the meaning of life and what is needed to face it. As a lyric poet, Wordsworth analyses himself and examines the dangerous fragility and variability of moods and states of mind, and the facility with which pessimistic thoughts burrow into his mind. He also welcomes providential meetings with characters who stand up unflinchingly to the worst fate can throw at them; he can also turn for comfort to the bottomless resource of a bountiful nature, which, as in Hopkins, ‘is never spent’; then he runs off in pursuit of other experiences that lie beyond the forms and moments of apparent paralysis. No poet before him had been so conscious of the tension between ‘is’ and ‘ought’: in the ‘Ode to Duty’ Wordsworth declares his allegiance to duty

16

Not counting The Prelude, Wordsworth wrote a total of about 600 poems.

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and responsibility, while at the same time admitting to an inborn propensity towards anarchism. 2. The first of the ‘Lucy poems’, possibly dedicated to his prematurely deceased sister-in-law, is a short ballad in seven quatrains which prefigures Rossetti and Morris in the theme of chivalry mixed with surreal ingredients. The sensitive knight lives ‘a strange adventure’ when he falls under the spell of the moon. Like the ‘idiot boy’ in the poem of the same name, he seems bewitched by what he sees (it is no coincidence that ‘fits’ and ‘fixed’ sound similar). While horse and rider ascend the hill, the moon drops, and the knight falls into a trance and a state of hypnosis; in the oneiric state between waking and sleeping, the moon has disappeared behind the cottage roof, a possible indication that Lucy might be dead. She is. In the third of the five poems that make up the cycle – though they may not have been conceived a such – ungrateful nature reclaims Lucy, and in the fourth, the poet is forced to admit that Lucy, whom he believed to be eternal, has been taken up in the overall, revolving movement of the cosmos, which is, after all, a form of eternity. The pagan or pantheistic perspective of otherworldly existence is different to the ‘eternal life’ of religion (as in the poetry of Dylan Thomas) and takes, as it were, the sting out of death. Lucy Gray has more realistic connotations – the usual chaste beauty, wild and solitary; she is struck down by mischance, while going to the aid of her fellow-creatures,17 and arouses the poignant recollection of the witness; but her spirit is still in the air, and, somehow, she is still alive. Of the three long poems of this decade, The Ruined Cottage, later expanded to become The Excursion, was published in the original version only in 1949. It is the story, in truth too sentimental and pathetic, of the famine that hit the countryside at the end of the eighteenth century, and the hardships endured by the farmworkers, as exemplified by the destruction of a family for reasons that are largely exogenous, but also endogenous to some small extent. The old man tells the visitor the odyssey of his daughter, after first expounding the harsh law that all that lives must die, and that it is the best 17

The father, however, is a Captain Hook (he uses such a tool to reach a bundle of straw he needs to light the lantern for his daughter’s journey) whose commands must be obeyed.

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that die first. The daughter, who is also a mother and a wife, resists against all the difficulties of her condition, until her unemployed husband joins the army; the woman’s will-power begins to waver, and she becomes, with the passing of time, catatonic and stupefied, staring fixated at the horizon (fixation is a recurrent psychological phenomenon on various levels of meaning). Suffering, however, is cathartic, and, as with Lucy, life goes round and begins again, and the contingent is swallowed up in the eternal becoming of nature. In ‘Michael’, the second poem, the anecdote recounted springs from the fact that the wayfarer discovers a nook unknown to anyone else, which can be reached only by climbing up a steep path.18 The cue for the story comes from a pile of stones, as symbolic and suggestive as the ‘thorn’. The story tells of the hard-working family of the shepherd, Michael, who are paying the price for having loaned money to a spendthrift relative: their son, Luke, must find work elsewhere to avoid the family home’s being seized to pay off their debt. The subtext here is the story of Abraham, because Michael bids farewell to Luke with truly patriarchal solemnity near the mound where a sheepfold was to be built. But Luke will wander from the path of righteousness and will be forced to emigrate, betraying the trust placed in him by his father. 3. Fickleness, inconstancy, the sudden change from joy to fear and doubt, but also the possibility of recovery: this is the subject of ‘Resolution and Independence’. The problem Wordsworth never succeeds in solving is how to deal with the fragility of a mind that tends to plummet into melancholy, and how to maintain a functional mental balance. The Lucretian creator is even attacked for taking insufficient care of his creatures. But the experience recollected and recounted is seen, almost at the same time as it is being told, as a sign from heaven. The prelude of the poem rests on the opposition between the untiring dynamism of nature, which is also protean and ever-changing – from the storm a short while before to the cloudless sky now – and the mutability of nature and the changeability of the human psyche, on the one hand, and the immobility of the old leech gatherer on the other. The old man is, in fact, like a meteorite that has landed on top of 18

The exploration of virgin nature (‘Nutting’) has become a cliché, like the poet’s arrival in some hidden nook inhabited by pure, tired characters. Adjectives like ‘unseen’, ‘untrodden’ and ‘unknown’ appear frequently in Wordsworth.

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a hill, or some sea-monster immobile on a rock. He stands, shut tight like an oyster or a clam, as if to show he is extraneous to and unassailable by the world around him. He, too, is biblical in his venerable aspect with his flowing grey locks, stout staff by his side, and his calm, courteous address. In fact, by gathering leeches he is in some respects a physician and at the same time a fisher of souls. He wanders here and there teaching, and by teaching calms the poet’s nagging thoughts on the absurdity of life, lack of purpose and futility of always looking for answers. He repeats mechanically his message of perseverance, and the poet is heartened and brought to recognize the working of providence in the world. On the same wavelength are the two most famous poems of this decade. ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ – usually known as ‘Daffodils’ – celebrates the poet’s reaction to the sight of a field of daffodils by the side of the lake, and the benefits this sight brought to him then and in later life. In the great ‘Pindaric’ ode of 1807, ‘Intimations of Immortality’, ‘the inward eye’ is half blind after years of growth, and, as a consequence, the earth has lost its pristine beauty, and its glory has been dimmed (Hopkins says much the same thing). The beginning of the poem is yet another statement of a return of sadness in spite of a miraculous retrieval, in extremis, of a tiny part of the joy he once felt. The poet participates in the ‘gladness of the May’ and in the joy of nature as she is transformed by spring, but he knows that nothing is like it was before: something is missing. The fifth stanza tells the story of the child’s soul that still ‘shines’ with pre-natal bliss. Memory is of no help, however much the poet appeals to it: birth means, not remembering, as Plato would have us believe, but forgetting – because of the gradual encroaching of contingent cares and worries, the glimpses of heavenly bliss become rarer and fainter. Some little part of the gleam of immortality continues to exist, and with this we must be content. Childhood, as the poet realizes in the end, is an integral part of man, and continues to reverberate through his entire being. Although the vision has gone, it participates always in the wild dance of nature, but through the calm composure of the now-grown man.19 19

Critics have proved, on the basis of numerous verbal echoes, that the ode was written by Wordsworth with Coleridge’s ‘Dejection: An Ode’ in mind. The heterodox idea that the soul predates creation, and the theory of the gradual fading of the celestial vision, are clearly taken from Henry Vaughan.

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§ 182. Wordsworth V: ‘The Prelude’ In 1807, the bulk of Wordsworth’s poetry was yet to be written: except for two monumental works, most of what was to come consisted of occasional poetry composed, for example, following the dates of his excursions to Scotland (1814), the Continent (1820) and various places in England (1833); a series of meditative-descriptive sonnets – a form Wordsworth found particularly congenial, along with blank verse – was dedicated to the river Duddon; another series, in two parts, of ‘ecclesiastical’ sonnets tells the story of the Church in England, focusing on the milestone events. The White Doe of Rylstone is a historical poem in seven long cantos, unique in its kind, but far from gripping. The Excursion (1814) is second only to the Prelude in dimensions, but has never been much liked. It features four characters: one is the poet himself, the second is referred to as ‘the Wanderer’, the third is ‘the Solitary’ (he has lost his wife, and lives alone, far from all human contact), and the fourth is ‘the Pastor’. Clearly, behind these characters is Wordsworth himself: the Solitary has passed from domestic happiness to repulsion and then lack of faith; he has emigrated to America, has been fired by, has hoped in, and then despaired of the French Revolution and now finds himself with nothing – no friends, no family, no love and no hope. This kind of pattern, however, which will turn up again in several Victorian poems, presupposes a way out of the situation of prostration; in this case, the path to salvation lies through a series of remedies like those proposed by Burton to deal with melancholy. In these ‘therapeutic’ proposals, discussed by the various characters, might be seen premonitions of the ‘conversation piece’, in that various opinions are offered on the same therapy. The group of three makes its way to the Pastor, who reminds them of the rites of the Church, and begins to speak to the Solitary of his parishioners, living and dead. The Solitary is disappointed: he wants to hear stories of desperate folk, but all the pastor speaks of is virtuous and happy people. The discussion opens up to include social scandals like child labour in factories, and the group invokes changes in the laws to counter these inhumane phenomena. In the end, the Solitary presents ‘a sprightly mien/ Of hopeful preparation’: he has been vaccinated. 2. The Prelude grew slowly, revised and corrected every day throughout the poet’s life, during long periods in which nothing particularly noteworthy took place. There are some curiosities, though: in 1812 he made peace

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with Coleridge after a quarrel; Wordsworth wrote a foreword for a tourist guide of Cumberland in 1810; in 1813 he received a strange sinecure (as a stamp distributor!) which he gave up in 1842; in 1813 he moved house to Rydal Mount, which became his permanent abode. The great verse autobiography that took fifty years to write was begun in 1795; a first version dating from 1798–1799 was in two segments, and was meant to form part of The Recluse;20 about a thousand lines tell the story of the poet’s life up to the age of seventeen (this first version was discovered and published only in 1926). Revised and extended to five books in 1804, in 1807 it was read by Coleridge in thirteen books. After Wordsworth’s death in 1850, it was finally published – in fourteen books. Wordsworth saw this as ‘a poem for Coleridge’; the title now used, which has its logical justification, and is quite appropriate, was thought up by his wife, Mary Hutchinson. Several scholars have scrutinized the three or four versions, and have been convinced they have identified the watershed between the two successive phases of Romanticism itself. The final version of the ascent to Mount Snowdon lacks the dynamic force it has in the 1805 draft, and marks the transition from a blinding, overwhelming fusion with nature, almost by definition an ephemeral experience, to the mature realization of a fracture between it and the observer. Critics have speculated on the reasons that dissuaded Wordsworth from publishing any of these versions during his lifetime. One possibility is that between the first and second version he transformed the protagonist from a Romantic hero overflowing with ideals of liberty into an obedient subject of the queen.21 The 1805 version was, until recently, 20 All that survives of this poem are a few scattered fragments. Wordsworth thought of it as a chapel placed before a Gothic church. 21 In the 1805 edition, the poet describes his second trip to France: in front of the Bastille, he picks up a stone and puts it in his pocket as a keepsake; after a period of indifference, he becomes fiercely anti-monarchist, and denounces the deplorable moral decline of monarchies; he throws himself into utopian schemes for political renewal based on equality, following his meetings with Captain Michel de Beaupuy. The story of Vaudracour, besides the biographical references mentioned above (§ 178.1 n. 4), also contains a denunciation of the law that prohibited marriage between different social classes. Once back home, Wordsworth condemned the war declared by England against France, although he also witnessed the transformation of France from victim of aggression to aggressor.

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the preferred one because in it the discrepancy between Wordsworth the internal actor and Wordsworth the poet is minimal, and the two masks almost coincide. Lately, however, the 1850 edition has gained in ‘popularity’. 3. Regarding both the second version (1805) and the 1850 one, the first question to ask is why an English poem should be presented in the unusual format of thirteen or fourteen books, an iconoclastic transgression of the classical rule of twelve, as adopted by Milton, too. The answer is to be found in a signal of controversial dissociation from a kind of literature which is dedicated to falsified man, and in the choice of a new objective. The poet is inspired by a desire for truth, a need which goes straight to the heart of concrete, historical man, not an idealized version of the same, and which leads towards the absolute essence of man. In the eighth book, we are informed that the shepherd is meant to represent the actual shepherds the poet met in various pastures in England, and is not a servile imitation of Greek models. The rest follows. The choice of subject-matter is recounted in the Introduction: subject after subject has been rejected because worn out by too much use; age-old conventions pertaining to the appropriate form and contents of a long poem are put to one side. The Prelude is modern, not ancient, and is, as I mentioned, ‘loco-descriptive’. It tells, at first, of Wordsworth’s childhood in the Lake District, and his schooldays at Hawkshead; then he focuses on Cambridge, the summer vacation and the first trip abroad, to France and Switzerland, followed by his return to England, and the end of youth. In terms of suspense or even just of interesting anecdotes, the poem falls short: there are no really exciting, or exceptional events; the pace is slow and the scope limited; even the habitual meetings with various specimens of humanity lack conviction. As Coleridge pointed out, there is too much ‘padding’, it is too long, and employs a superabundance of circumlocution, so that the discrepancy between the simplicity of the subject matter and the verbosity of the style is all too noticeable. Wordsworth the narrator has here decided to keep actual narration to a minimum. There are, it is true, instances of ‘existential snapshots’, but the context is often blurred; to make up for this lack of realistic setting, the poet often resorts to excessive emphasis, or humorous or satirical colouring. The only exception is the convincing, lively, realistic description of his arrival at Cambridge. Anecdotes inserted in the text are always preceded and accompanied by comments by the narrator; every now

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and then, he feels bound to repeat that the poem is addressed to Coleridge, and at the same time to underline his measureless affection for his sister. The procedural dispositions entail calculated risks: Wordsworth is – and, in the Prelude, makes no attempt to hide it – a repetitive poet, whose method is based on concentric waves spreading out from a centre. He re-uses strings already plucked, and enlarges on concepts already expressed. It is a collection of separate memories introduced by formulas such as ‘but perhaps I am forgetting …’; however, since Wordsworth feels so passionately the strength of memory and the remembered ecstasy in the presence of nature, everything seems new and convincing. The train of thought is interrupted at times by reports on the present and future progress of the recollection. The focus then narrows and homes in on a few illustrative anecdotes, which are, more often than not, ‘bathetic’, in that they respond to the poetics of the minute, humble, insignificant aspects of life, which are, however, for the poet, of great importance. It follows from what has been said above, that Wordsworth could not use the heroic couplet, which, among other virtues, was synthetic, and incompatible with superfluity. The only viable alternative was blank verse; the problem with that was how to avoid all possible contamination from Milton’s ‘organ voice’. The basic building block is the long, complex sentence, which sometimes risks becoming unfocused, imprecise and repetitive. A comparison might be made with Clough’s The Bothie (like The Prelude, a Bildung poem), which wisely uses the Latin hexameter to give the poem some kind of structure, although, unlike Wordsworth’s poem, it abounds in parodic elements quite alien to the Lake poet, thanks also to its metre. The challenge facing Wordsworth is to use the medium of verse for a subject more suited to prose: in fact, recent autobiographies by people like Gibbon, Rousseau and Goethe had been all in prose. For long stretches, the text of The Prelude is theoretical, gnomic and meditative, with frequent pauses and additions. The challenge has its difficulties, and at times, as Pater was the first to lament, along with lines that throb with intensity and originality, we find others that can only be described as anonymous, a bit like tedious prose. There is still the suspicion, in many people’s minds, that The Prelude would work better if it were, indeed, in prose. 4. That the time range should end with the year 1798, not counting anticipations and flash-forwards, is symptomatic: by the age of thirty, the

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human adult is already fully formed, and progresses as if by inertia, having made stock of all the spiritual and emotional food it needs. Wordsworth’s life is a good example of this generally accepted belief. In Book I of the poem (I, 621) he defines the basic function of remembering as retrieving ‘invigorating thoughts’ which help to ‘fix the wavering balance’ of the mind, and spur men on to ‘honourable toil’. This formulation echoes the mental continuity interrupted, or kept alive every time one performs the action of remembering: everything comes back, including the sensation felt at the time: ‘yet the morning gladness is not gone / Which then was in my mind’. The flow of memory is expressed in a fine metaphor at the beginning of Book IX: ‘Even as a river […] yielding to old remembrances and swayed / In part by fear to shape a way direct, /That would engulph him soon in the ravenous sea, / Turns, and will measure back his course, far back, /Seeking the very regions which he crossed / In his first outset […].’ The psychological theory of the ‘spots of time’ that so much resembles that of Joyce’s epiphany, indicates not only an exact repetition of the emotion felt in that same place revisited, but something more as well: the memory of a stormy morning at the top of a hill, with a trembling sense of expectation, is the automatic response every time it rains or storms. Wordsworth tells the story of his first thirty years to assure himself of his evolution towards the fixed points of his most precious affections, of the formation of his humanitarian passion, and the birth of an energetic optimism regarding the salvation of the human race. His first thanks go to Nature, described at her fiercest and most demanding in the excursion to the rocky hill overlooking Ullswater, and the fear that made him run for his life; next comes Nature as a teacher, who endows man with his greatest passions as well as his moral compass. The object of the pursuit, reached after an often winding journey punctuated by crises and waverings, is living Nature, perceived not through a few, classic books.22 Love is pronounced the beginning and end of life, and the moving force of creation. Without love, nothing holds. Love is expressed in both animate and inanimate nature. At the end of his journey, Wordsworth

22

Homer, the Bible and folk ballads, whose educational power is second only to that of Nature.

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had also placed, at the top of the hierarchy of human faculties, intuition, and the axiom that ‘reason in her most exalted mood’ equals intellectual love. § 183. Coleridge* I: From the epistemic context to symbolic recreation The works that spring to mind at the mere mention of the name of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) are three poems, written – but not 1

*

The Poems of Coleridge, ed. E. H. Coleridge, 2 vols, London 1912 and later editions, now superseded, together with all previous partial editions of the prose, by Collected Works, ed. K. Coburn, 23 vols, Princeton, NJ and London 1969–2003. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, 6 vols, Oxford 1956–1973. Notebooks, ed. K. Coburn, 5 vols, London 1957–2002. Some valuable Italian anthologies are: M. Praz, Poeti inglesi dell’Ottocento, Firenze 1925, 119–62; I poemi demoniaci, ed. M. Pagnini, Firenze 1996. ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ has been translated by M. Luzi (Milano 1949), by B. Fenoglio (Torino 1964), and by G. Giudici (with Kubla Khan, and meticulously annotated and with a balanced Afterword by M. Bacigalupo, Milano 1987). Life. J. Gillman, The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, London 1838 (by his doctor); H. D. Traill, Coleridge, London 1884; J. D. Campbell, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Narrative of the Events of his Life, London and New York 1894; E. K. Chambers, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Biographical Study, Oxford 1938; L. Hanson, The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Early Years, London 1938; W. J. Bate, Coleridge, New York 1968; O. Doughty, Perturbed Spirit: The Life and Personality of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Rutherford, NJ 1981; R. Ashton, The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Critical Biography, Oxford 1987; R. Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions, and Coleridge: Darker Reflections, London 1989–1998. Criticism. J.  L. Lowes,  The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination, Boston, MA 1927; J. H. Muirhead, Coleridge as Philosopher, London 1930; I. A. Richards, Coleridge on Imagination, New York 1935; R. P. Warren, ‘A Poem of Pure Imagination: An Experiment in Reading’, Kenyon Review, III (1946), 391– 427 (a landmark in ‘Rime’ criticism); H. Read, Coleridge as Critic, London 1949; E. Chinol, Il pensiero di S. T. Coleridge, Venezia 1953; H. House, Coleridge: The Clark Lectures, London 1953; E. Schneider, Coleridge, Opium and ‘Kubla Khan’, Chicago, IL 1953; J. B. Beer, Coleridge, the Visionary, London 1959, Coleridge’s Poetic Intelligence, London 1977, Coleridge’s Play of Mind, Oxford 2010, and, as editor, Coleridge’s Variety: Bicentenary Studies, London 1974; J. Colmer, Coleridge: Critic of Society, Oxford 1959; C. Woodring, Politics in the Poetry of Coleridge, Madison, WI 1961; G. Hough, Coleridge and the Victorians, in The English Mind, ed. H. S. Davies and G. Watson, Cambridge 1964; G. Watson, Coleridge the Poet, London 1966;

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published at once, at least not all of them, and one, or even two of them left unfinished – in one prolonged fit of inspiration at the end of the century. They are, of course, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and Kubla Khan, more or less of equal merit, and, much inferior, Christabel, not forgetting the prose work, Biographia Literaria, the first complete study of literary theory

T. McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition, Oxford 1969, Originality and Imagination, Baltimore, MD and London 1985, and Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Modalities of Fragmentation, Princeton, NJ 1981; CRHE, 2 vols, ed. J. R. de Jackson, London 1970 and 1991; B. Lawrence, Coleridge and Wordsworth in Somerset, Newton Abbot 1970; S. Prickett, Coleridge and Wordsworth: The Poetry of Growth, London 1970; O. Barfield, What Coleridge Thought, Middletown, CT 1971; S. T. Coleridge, ed. L. R. Brett, London 1971; N. Fruman, Coleridge, The Damaged Archangel, New York 1971; A. Grant, A Preface to Coleridge, London 1972; J. Cornwell, Coleridge: Poet and Revolutionary, 1772–1804, London 1973; R. Parker, Coleridge’s Meditative Art, Ithaca, NY 1975; E. Shaffer, ‘Kubla Khan’ and the Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature 1770–1880, Cambridge 1975; J. R. Barth, The Symbolic Imagination: Coleridge and the Romantic Tradition, Princeton, NJ 1977; L. S. Lockridge, Coleridge the Moralist, Ithaca, NY and London 1977; G. Dekker, Coleridge and the Literature of Sensibility, London 1978; J. Christensen, Coleridge’s Blessed Machine of Language, Ithaca, NY 1981; K. M. Wheeler, The Creative Mind in Coleridge’s Poetry, London 1981; P. Hamilton, Coleridge’s Poetics, Oxford 1983; J. S. Hill, A Coleridge Companion, London 1983; C. M. Wallace, The Design of ‘Biographia Literaria’, Oxford 1983; Coleridge’s Imagination, ed. R. Gravil, L. Newlyn and N. Roe, Cambridge 1985; A. J. Harding, Coleridge and the Inspired Word, Kingston and Montreal 1985; A. Serpieri, ‘La Ballata di Coleridge: il senso circolare’, in Retorica e immaginario, Parma 1986, 301–31; J. T. Miller, Jr, Ideology and Enlightenment: The Political and Social Thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, New York and London 1987; N. Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years, Oxford and New York 1987; A. C. Goodson, Verbal Imagination: Coleridge and the Language of Modern Criticism, New York and Oxford 1988; P. Magnuson, Coleridge and Wordsworth: A Lyrical Dialogue, Princeton, NJ 1988; M. Pagnini, ‘S. T. Coleridge, Kubla Khan: filologia ed ermeneutica epistemica’, in Semiosi. Teoria ed ermeneutica del testo letterario, Bologna 1988, 265–89, ‘Christabel di S. T. Coleridge. Prefazione per un’edizione immaginaria’, in Strumenti critici, VII, 2 (1992), 195–222, and ‘Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Frost at Midnight’, in PLE, 287–300 (the present discussion on Coleridge owes much to the first of the three essays); I. Wylie, Young Coleridge and the Philosophers of Nature, Oxford 1988; S. Perry, Coleridge and the Uses of Division, Oxford 1999; A. Riem Natale, L’intima visione. Frammenti dell’uno nella poesia di Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Udine 1999; The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge, ed. L. Newlyn, Cambridge 2002.

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in the English language. A fact always remarked on by the critics, but no less singular for all that, is that this poetic triad, with the possible addition of a handful of other poems, stands out solitary in the context of a literary career that goes from 1787 to 1833. The standard edition of Coleridge’s works (just recently published) comprises almost 700 compositions, the large majority of which are insignificant, some even unworthy and ‘illegible’.1 Even stranger is the fact that the triad stands out from the rest not just because of its aesthetic excellence (by general consent, the three poems, along with compositions by German, French and Italian writers, epitomize Continental Romanticism) but because of a very definite difference in poiéin, or poetic power. Much of Coleridge’s poetry is analytical, introspective, dianoetic, and roughly speaking, lyrical, whereas the three poems of the triad are synthetic, eidetic and objectivizing. As in the case of Wordsworth, Coleridge works better when his rational part is not present, or in the background, or when it is transformed into a vision, and poetry becomes pure imagining. All three poems are certainly dazzling intrusions into the mystery of existence, or formulations of the process of writing itself and of the essence of poetry; but, adopting the expressiveness of vision and symbol, instead of allegory, they do not form continuative, consistent isotopies, and, instead, invoke a pluri-isotopic semiosis; in other words, they give rise to an interweaving of non-concordant discourses.2 It is well known that Wordsworth was the poet of ‘final touches’ par excellence: he attended to his poems with religious reverence, editing, correcting, polishing, preparing them for posterity and immortality. It would, conversely, be limiting to define Coleridge as simply a poet: he was a thinker, theologian, philosopher, politologist, literary critic and much else besides; in erudition he is second only to Robert Burton,3 though he was incapable of moulding it and bringing it – as Carlyle did – from chaos into an ordered cosmos. He wrote poetry, but took no pains to have it published, or to edit and collect it, at least not as assiduously and painstakingly as Wordsworth. He would revise ad infinitum compositions which were then never finished. Nor did it ever cross his mind to think in terms of poetic pyramids: his longest completed poem is just over 600 lines long. He did, indeed, plan a collected edition of his works in 1815, but all 1 2 3

Bacigalupo 1987, 135. Cf. Pagnini 1988, 267. Lowes 1927 applies this to the whole of Coleridge.

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that came out of this was Biographia Literaria, a gigantic amplification of the original introduction to the planned collection. His opus magnum was to be philosophical, vaguely about Christianity as the only true philosophy, but it was never written, and, when he died, only a few scattered notes were found, all of them deemed unpublishable, mainly because they were almost all plagiarized from Kant.4 2. Coleridge possessed great natural skill as a teller of exotic, symbolic fables together with a philosophical grounding based on German philosophers, Kant and Schelling in particular. But, supporter of the concept of organicity as he was, he left behind him a disorganic, fragmentary corpus of thoughts, which he would propound in lectures prepared using notes that have come down to us transcribed by others. This is the format in which we have to read him. In the course of thirty years, the literary taste of the end of the eighteenth century had changed completely. On his deathbed, Coleridge said: ‘I could even be witty.’ As a mediator for the English reader of Kantian and post-Kantian transcendentalism, Coleridge has carved out for himself a tiny niche in the history of philosophy, though René Wellek, followed by many others, ridiculed the fragility of his thought and produced documentary evidence of numerous instances of whole passages lifted from Schelling. So, Coleridge criticism has, from the start, busied itself with the reconstruction of the ideological humus that gives rise to his poems: the poetry itself tends to be forgotten. The interest in his philosophical background is no doubt justified by the huge quantity of Coleridge’s philosophical and theoretical writings, and by the fact that he himself sacrificed his poetic gift to philosophical speculation after 1800. The bibliography given above lists more than twenty volumes of Coleridge’s opera omnia, of which only two are of poetry. 3. To summarize: Coleridge, the son of an Anglican vicar, was, when young, the first great Unitarian writer (manqué, or latent).5 This sect obviously denies the Trinity, but is not deist; it emphasizes the rational road to faith and the importance of tolerance; it does not take issue with evangelicals or Calvinists, but is anti-Calvinist, rejecting the concepts of predestination and hell and, therefore, damnation. It invokes the law of forgiveness, 4 5

Fruman 1971, 136–7. On Trinitarianism, see also Volume 5, § 106, on Elizabeth Gaskell. In Biographia, Coleridge sums up his Unitarianism as ‘Psilanthropism’, that is, belief in Christ as the true son of Joseph and in the Resurrection rather than the Crucifixion.

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and overturns the Old Testament threat of the sins of the father being visited upon the sons. Above all, he presented, in Biographia Literaria, a theory of literature and aesthetics based on the premise that the purpose of art is not to instruct but to give pleasure ‘by means of beauty’. In a series of paragraphs which have since become essential reading for any modern literary theorist, he formulated the famous distinction between ‘fancy’ and ‘imagination’. The opposite of imagination was the cold discipline of Augustan and late eighteenth-century rules. Man and nature are linked by a two-way connection – man to nature and vice versa. The circular flow conveys joy for as long as one feels it, because, at any moment, it may disappear and generate disappointment. The connection is the work of the imagination. The heart of Coleridge’s philosophy lies in identifying the sources of the imagination and in the mystery underlying the world of phenomena. The label applied to Coleridge’s three principal poems, and accepted by all – ‘demonic poems’ – should be seen in the light of the Platonic and Goethian etymology of the first word: gaps and abysses that split open the surface of reality, or tentative investigations of the noumenal, of what, that is, lies beyond the surface of reality. Alessandro Serpieri has stressed the almost tortured awareness of a centre of which the subject discovers the hidden bottom and which is compared with an elusive circumference; this is the process behind the ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’.6 This picture does not fit the fact that Coleridge gradually became a devout Trinitarian, and that his evolution, at least judging by what he says, was towards the ‘relaxation’ so typical of the English Romantics, with the exception of Shelley and Keats. He declared himself a ‘necessitarian’ at the time he was writing the three poems, by which he meant someone who tries to put every single thing and being in its correct place in an ordered cosmos. Several other conservative or quietist definitions in his letters (for example, his firm conviction that marriage is indissoluble, or his battle against the ‘irreligious metaphysics of modern infidels’) clash with others that are more daring and progressive. 6

Riem 1999 examines, in turn, the possible influences on Coleridge of the first English translations of the classics of Indian mysticism, like the Bhagavad Gita, and of the Tao and Buddhist traditions, passing ‘via German Idealism’ in a kind of connubial union. Riem’s re-readings are conducted along a fascinating weave of references, and Serpieri 1986, too, subscribes to the hypothesis of a connection with the traditions of heterodox philosophy (Kabala, alchemy, occultism).

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Strange to say, none other than Walter Pater fell into the trap of Coleridge the defender of the Absolute, and attributed to Wordsworth the modern spirit of the Relative7 and the concept of modernity as something liquid, flowing, ever-changing, which, actually, is characteristic of Coleridge. Instead, for Pater, Coleridge attempted to ‘fix [scientific truth] in absolute formulas’, while, in fact, the said scientific truth is ‘shifting, relative, and full of gradations’. Pantheistic philosophy, too, derived directly from Schelling, and admired in Wordsworth, is, for Pater, an anachronistic relic swept away by positivism and by the law of mechanics. Of the two, Wordsworth and Coleridge, the latter was, for Pater, the more Romantic, owing to the strange beauty that attracts with the shiver of the supernatural. Coleridge’s only claim to greatness, which, for Pater, resided in the ‘Ancient Mariner’ and in Christabel but not in Kubla Khan, consisted precisely in the rejection of his philosophy and his prose as seen in the two poems just mentioned. As I mentioned, English Romanticism is a period of tensions. 4. The three poems in question met with a mixed, not to say negative, reception. Wordsworth had serious doubts about the ‘Rime’, and these were echoed by several anonymous reviewers (amongst whom, his former friend, Southey) who saw in it only absurdity and obscurity, or, worse still, indecency. The actually androgynous Geraldine in Christabel was labelled a transvestite, capable – in one of the parodies that both ridiculed and immortalized the poem – of getting Christabel pregnant in a spurious, imaginary continuation of Coleridge’s poem. Kubla Khan, the extemporary offering of an opium addict, was judged nothing more than a curiosity, and even by the most percipient scholars, a riddle. One might add that an entire generation of Victorians literally forgot Coleridge, the only one of the six great Romantics to be cast into oblivion. The ‘belittling’ of Coleridge, almost a ‘defusing’ of his demonic potential, was set in motion by his eldest son, Hartley,8 who thought that Geraldine was 7 8

Volume 6, § 185.2. The precocious Hartley Coleridge (1796–1849) had before him, according to Hazlitt, Southey and Wordsworth, as well as his father, a bright future as a philosopher and poet; but he remained just a promise: he was lazy, ineffectual, and a dreamer, and failed to finish a Prometheus. His dominating characteristic, as expressed in various sonnets, was wistful resignation.

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‘a divine creature in the power of demonic forces’. Matthew Arnold, the greatest of Victorian critics, was almost completely silent about him, the only mention in his writings being an oblique reference in an essay on the largely unknown French writer, Joubert, presented by Arnold as ‘the French Coleridge’, and, in any case, far superior to the original. Arnold the essayist was of the same opinion as those contemporary reviewers who reviled Coleridge, judging him to be confused and often incomprehensible. A minor Victorian, Clough, who confessed to being under the constrictive influence of the ‘really visible world’, accused Coleridge of lacking ‘concreteness’ and ‘reality’. His return to some degree of favour began with Swinburne, and, after a cooling with the modernists, continued with the latent deconstruction that followed the First World War, especially with the archetypal, symbolic and psychoanalytical schools. § 184. Coleridge II: Conversation pieces The youngest son (of thirteen children) of an Anglican vicar from Devon (Coleridge called him ‘a perfect Parson Adams’ because of his friendly, peaceful temperament and his considerable learning), Coleridge himself, like three other brothers, was destined to an ecclesiastical career (in 1798 he was definitively freed of this necessity by an annual allowance of £150 from the Wedgwood brothers, the well-known china manufacturers, for him to undertake a literary career instead. The allowance was halved in 1811 owing to the firm’s financial straits).9 As a child, Coleridge was a dreamer, indolent, touchy, and already solipsistic, and, significantly, addicted to fables like the Arabian Nights. At the death of his father, he was enrolled for eight years in the London school for the orphans of the clergy called ‘Christ’s Hospital’, where he met Lamb, who was to remember him with affection in a long memorial in which he dwelt on Coleridge’s eloquence and precocious mastery of the classics. At Cambridge, Coleridge composed his first poems, influenced by the sonneteer, Bowles;10 like Wordsworth, 9 Cf. § 226.2 for Hazlitt’s version. 10 Reverend W. L. Bowles (1762–1850), the author, in 1789, of fourteen correct but colourless sonnets, and other longer poems, all now mercifully forgotten. Coleridge’s sonnets were also influenced (BAUGH, vol. IV, 1150 n. 6) by the ‘elegiac’ ones of Charlotte Smith (§ 168.3).

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he too was an enthusiastic supporter of the French Revolution. His infatuation lasted longer than Wordsworth’s, and, together with Southey, temporarily a radical like him, he planned the foundation of a ‘pantisocracy’, or utopian colony, in America, based on communistic criteria; the project never materialized, owing to lack of funds and, more importantly, of practical skills in the founders. Coleridge married Southey’s sister-in-law, Sara Fricker, but the marriage (celebrated in the ‘Chatterton’ church of St Mary Redcliffe in Bristol) was ill-starred from the start. The planned pantisocracy was the second of the two madcap projects of Coleridge at Cambridge: for a short while, in fact, he had enrolled as a cavalry officer under the false name of Silas Tomkyn Comberbache (which proves a certain linguistic imagination, together with the Quixotic exhibitionism of the fearless knight). The pantisocratic utopia was realized on a smaller scale when Coleridge rented a cottage on the canal in Bristol, where, now married and a father, he became a gardener and farmer; luckily, his yearly rent was extremely low. Disappointed by Southey’s withdrawal from the pantisocracy project, he was compensated by his meeting with the rising star of Wordsworth. In 1797 the poet and his sister had moved to Somerset, and set up house a few miles away from Coleridge. The same year saw the birth and almost immediate demise of the radical journal, The Watchman; more importantly, it was the year in which almost all Coleridge’s poetic masterpieces were written. 2. Even the most committed and conscientious scholars skip Coleridge’s school poems. The terminus a quo is 1787; Coleridge is fifteen, and every year sees an increasing number of poems written, in which there are no signs of youthful megalomania, but predictable scholastic exercises on the usual subjects, as well as curiosities, and odd, sometimes burlesque compositions. Imitations abound, of Anacreon, Spenser and Ossian. Another stylistic mode is the ‘effusion’, dedicated to seasons and places. As in Wordsworth, the title indicates the occasion that gave rise to the poem (the death of a sister, the departure for Cambridge), as well as the place and date of writing. Some of the titles are far from pithy (Coleridge was never any good at titles). There are two ‘monodies’ on wildly different subjects – one on Chatterton and the other on … a tea-pot. None of the poems rises above the mediocre, except, perhaps, one or two dedicated to the unsuccessful pantisocracy.

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The only evidence of a coordinated project is a series of sonnets on famous people. The terminus ad quem of this part of his production is 1798. In the Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge inserted a scene from Osorio, a play that was staged only in 1813, under the title, Remorse. The play tells the prophetic story of a foundling who goes mad, becomes a heretic, is punished, and, at last, escapes on board a ship and ends up surrounded by savages. It might, however, be considered a radical poem of protest, because another passage from Osorio targets the iniquitous prison system of the country. Coleridge’s fourth contribution to the Lyrical Ballads, ‘The Nightingale’, establishes its place in poetic convention (the ‘melancholy nightingale’) before describing the musical concerts given by the nightingales near an uninhabited castle, and a young girl who goes to listen to them every evening. 3. The ‘conversation poems’, instead, are easily circumscribable: all in blank verse, in stanzas of different length, three-part structure (description of place, meditation, return to the original setting). Exercises in communication, and self-awareness therapy, their diction and development are therefore laborious rather than light and swift; they are analytical rather than synthetic, objective and descriptive, and are filtered through a fiction of being written down there and then, so that the verbs are all in the present tense to reflect the flow of speech. ‘The Eolian Harp’ begins stating a sense of well-being, the silence or hushed whispering of the evening, and the ecstatic fusion with nature of Coleridge and Sara, who almost reach a kind of synesthetic orgasm. The analogy developed in the poem is that the mind troubled by fears is like an Eolian harp played by the wind, or the surface of the sea gleaming like diamonds in the sun. The whole of nature is expressed in musical terms – trembling harps that, touched by an intellectual breeze, produce thoughts: a kind of primeval creative breath. ‘But this is pantheism!’, his devout, orthodox wife seems to say, and the poet is summoned back to a more traditional faith in the true God. Admitting he has gone astray and entertained inopportune thoughts, he is induced to thank God the healer and giver of the happiness he feels. What was dangerous about pantheism? Coleridge thought it very near to atheism.11 In 11

Hill 1983, 29.

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‘This Lime-tree Bower My Prison’ the poet imagines the happiness denied him by a banal accident, and enjoyed, instead, by his three friends in their walk in the beautiful countryside; but even in his enforced immobility, he feels the stirrings of universal love, and the sense of well-being that nature brings in all its manifestations. ‘Frost at Midnight’ presents the poet looking after his young son in the middle of the night; in the deep silence, he identifies with the flickering flame of the candle, and interprets its dance as a correlative of the mind, so that the scene expresses an oxymoron of stillness in movement or imperceptible stirring in apparent immobility.12 The veil on the flame was an old superstition according to which a relative or dear friend was about to arrive, and, by Proustian association, Coleridge remembers similar arrivals he has dreamt of: family or friends visiting him at school, and other nostalgic recollections of childhood. He goes on to reflect on the difference between him and his son, who will grow up, not in an oppressive cloister or loud city, but in the peace of nature, and in this nature will discover God, the God of pantheism, in every form of life. ‘Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement’ describes the untouched beauty of a place immersed in nature where God is palpably present; the poet must leave this heaven, called to a place where men suffer and slave. ‘Fears in Solitude’ is the last of this group of poems that show a precarious stabilization of the subject in his union with nature and, therefore, with the Creator. Yet, once again, one notes the limits of this blissful isolation, and the need to go out among his fellow-men and help to mend a world torn by ‘strife’. The silence surrounding the artist, and the summons of ‘ancestral voices prophesying war’ constitute one of the dilemmas of the ‘demonic poems’. § 185. Coleridge III: The demonic triptych I. ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ Coleridge’s three poetic masterpieces belong to the area, and breathe the rarefied air, of anti-Enlightenment Romanticism. At the very beginning of the Romantic movement, as we have seen, the subordination of 12

Cf. the perspicacious comments in Pagnini 2002, 300, on biological and psychic ‘zero degree’ in isotopic form in the opening phases of the poem.

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intuition and perception to reason was inverted; in the wake of a re-thinking of Kantian philosophy, attempts were made to define the artistic symbol as an, at least approximate, key to the noumenon, which, by definition, escapes rational classification and can be seen only in epiphanic flashes of intuition and the imagination. Coleridge thrice imitates the hermeneutic act; this is deeply significant given that, for the Romantics, the work of art is an ‘analogue’ of the act of creation, and entails ‘the same process that acts in nature’; in particular, the pulsating seminal energy, symbolized by the river Alph in Kubla Khan, was to pervade all of nineteenth-century thought. The three poems use for the first time an expressive mode that is without precedent in Coleridge, and is the very opposite to the style of his conversation pieces. A similar ‘semiosic’ structure, using unrelated, dazzling pictures and eidetic flashes, was responsible for the legend, which dogged the whole of the century, that these were poems without meaning, a mere string of evocative images. As a reaction, in the past fifty years and more, the three poems have been shown to be the most meaningful and polyvalent of all the great poems of the western canon, published and read in every language spoken on the planet. The reader does need, it is true, some sort of critical apparatus, with an introduction or foreword by one of the great acknowledged experts in the field, like Empson13 and, in Italy, Praz. Such critical commentaries often clash with each other as they fall to their favourite activity – searching for the sources behind these great reservoirs of images and symbols, which the poet tapped consciously or subconsciously. The starting point for all such critics is the uniquely imposing Road to Xanadu by Lowes, but they have since diversified into hundreds of diverging interpretations, typical, in particular, of the English-speaking world, in which new literary theories are born and die faster than elsewhere. For a start, it is strange that the ‘Rime’ should have appeared as a joint production with Wordsworth (the intention was to sell it to some journal for £5 and use the money to go on some pleasure trip). Wordsworth later admitted he was responsible for a few small parts of the poem, and for the idea of the albatross (taken, however, from the 13

His edition of the ‘Rime’ (London 1972) is however defined by Bacigalupo 1987, 151, not without justification, as ‘aberrant’.

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Voyage of the eighteenth-century traveller, George Shelvocke), but realized he had ‘to dissociate himself from an undertaking in which he would be a hindrance rather than a help’. Christabel is metrically more daring, since it contains the seeds – as may be inferred from the preface – of Hopkins’s ‘sprung rhythm’. The chronological order of the three poems is ad libitum, given the insurmountable difficulties in dating them. 2. One of the few undeniable facts about the ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ is that it belongs to the genre of the old English ballad, and echoes the specimens collected by Bishop Percy. The genre is also used to good effect by the German Romantics and Bürger’s ‘Leonore’, and, in England, by ‘Monk’ Lewis. Coleridge was not completely unprepared: Osorio has a plot that is reminiscent and premonitory (the protagonist tries to kill his older brother; he thinks he has succeeded, but has not, in fact, and the brother returns in disguise and induces him to repent). Wordsworth’s The Borderers quite independently plays the same tune. There is, furthermore, a manuscript of a few pages (which Coleridge insisted on including in his collected works) in which Cain’s exile is sketched in prose, and which contains many of the terms present in the ‘Rime’, besides several precise verbal ‘spies’ (for example, the psychological state of ‘agony’), suggesting an identification of the Mariner with Cain. Abel is a biblical ‘type’ of Christ, so that a genealogy linking Cain, Judas and the Mariner sounds convincing, though Abel is clearly visible in the name ‘Christabel’. The Cain prose sketch is itself a free biblical paraphrase that echoes Blake’s first prophetic poems. In the first version of the ‘Rime’ (1798 and in the Lyrical Ballads) Coleridge employed an ‘antique’ veneer, greatly reduced in the second edition of 1816, in which about fifty lines were suppressed. The old ballad form is visible in the obvious parataxis, syntactic inversions, the cabalistic numerology involving the numbers one, seven, and nine, the marked prosody and rhythm, the alliteration, the series of repetitions, and the sharp division of colours. A Latin epigraph, taken from Burnet, on invisible things, urging their discovery, is a paratext which, only in the second edition, is accompanied by a series of short prose captions in the left-hand margin, which synthesize, but also render ambiguous, the actions in the poem, so that they appear to be autonomous additions that not only do not coincide with, but actually contradict the story being told in

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the poem. This is an important point: in other words, in 1816 Coleridge amplified and revised the 1798 version, adding ideas and suggestions he had had in the meantime. So, two poets overlap, the Coleridge of 1798, and another, who, at a distance of fifteen or so years, re-reads and re-writes, changing the flow and direction of the text and its meaning, sometimes considerably, and pointing it towards new and different teleologies. The structure of the poem is ingenious: at the beginning the voice of the poet is heard from the wings. He then hands over to the Mariner; it is he who will narrate the story, his the only voice, apart from a few interruptions by the wedding guest; only the last two quatrains are spoken by the voice of the poet in the wings. 3. Coleridge himself was a traveller, or, rather, an excursionist. It is impossible to assign to his trip to Malta in 1804–1805 – of which, more later – a preparatory function, but it is certain, according to letters written on the subject of sea-journeys, that life was already imitating art. William and Dorothy Wordsworth had just met Coleridge, and were struck by his bright eyes and the strange magic of the things he said. The ceremony that the button-holed ‘guest’ is late for is a wedding, a communal rite that symbolizes the acceptance, into middle-class respectability, of a responsible husband and father. The autobiographical key is the most obvious tool available to the critic of today, who cannot but read the poem taking account of the interpretations of those who have gone before. In any case, in my opinion, the ‘Rime’ obliges the reader to leap acrobatically from one key to another, because of certain textual occurrences that may, indeed must, be interpreted according to a double or triple key; all methods have their positive sides, and no hierarchy is possible; if this is so, then we are left with the unanswered question of whether the abundance of keys is a resource, or does not, instead, denote an irreversible entropy, or, worse still, downright confusion and contradiction. Any list of interpretations would end with those of the poststructuralists, who seem to want to trace everything back to some external foundation, though the critic promises to shy away from any kind of interpretation ‘that bases meaning on a pre-constituted model’.14 14

Serpieri 1986, 305 n. 8.

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Still alive and kicking, renewed and refined, generation after generation, are the various interpretations defined as archetypal, allegorical or symbolic, sacramental-Christian, political, epistemic, Proppian, Faustian and Lacanian. Coleridge’s voice in 1816 is firmer and more explicit in pointing out the isotopy of guilt and expiation, and, camouflaged even in its meaning, the symbolic valency of the albatross as a symbol of Christ. However, in terms of the noumenal, the ultimate explanation of reality was, for Coleridge, unattainable: it was the fruit of Chance ‘in the fallen world’.15 Mariner and interpreter must therefore share the same hermeneutic experience, the same obligation to repeat the same story in order to extract some kind of meaning. The end of the poem is only apparently reassuring, with the comfort of religious faith and the confession to the hermit. So, it is true that the sacred, redemptive perspective does not signify total restoration: expiation is required; in the post-Edenic world, guilt is never completely washed away. Serpieri finds that the ‘Rime’ is spoiled because it is weighed down, towards the end, by an excess of magical and, especially, allegorical elements that seem in no way to be necessary.16 Coleridge asks himself if man is something cast off by a blind idiot we call nature, or the son of an infinitely good God;17 he convinces himself of the second hypothesis but is still terrorized by the first. That he is tempted to embrace it by drowning in a sea of contradictions was a thesis widely held at a time in which it was thought more important to open than close texts and transform small chinks into yawning gaps, or béances as they were called. The Christian-sacramental reading is opposed by Serpieri, who sees a prudential allegorical decoding in the second part (section five onwards), as if the poet was afraid and wanted to close in a hurry the doors he had opened.18 In reality, readings like Serpieri’s are themselves allegorical though they claim to detest allegory:

15 16 17 18

The verb ‘to drop’ occurs about ten times in the poem, in various contexts, and is part of the opposition pattern of  ‘high-low’. Lamb was of the same opinion (quoted in Serpieri 1986, 313). Letter of 27 January 1797. With a famous, pithy anecdote from the Arabian Nights, Coleridge countered the objection moved by the poet, Barbauld (that the poem had no moral) by saying that, if anything, it had too much.

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in his words, the poem is the allegory of the following tenet of Lacanian psychoanalysis: ‘the subject is spoken by the pressure of the Signifier, which constitutes his eternal check and determines his continuous wandering’.19 4. The basic characteristics of the ballad genre are immediacy and identification; in the ‘Rime’ the reader is at a disadvantage, in that he does not realize that the internal time is before 1522 (Magellan’s voyage in the Pacific), probably round about 1500. The first reference to the metaphorical area of sacrality is the wedding guest’s beating his breast when he hears the notes of a bassoon (an anachronistic instrument) issuing from the wedding feast; the guest is almost like Peter when he hears the cock crow, or the guest who refuses to go to the feast in the parable in the gospel. Also, at the Confiteor of the Catholic mass, the congregation usually beat their breasts. The first, crucial event of the voyage is the descent of the albatross, which is taken for a creature of God and ‘a Christian soul’, thus evoking the appearance of the dove at Christ’s baptism in the river Jordan. The killing of the albatross does not seem to me a Faustian act because there is no delirium of challenge, but it is true that it anticipates the act gratuit of impulsive killing often analysed by twentieth-century existentialism. The bird is killed by the crossbow; the word itself creates a vision of a cross and confirms the identification of the albatross with, or the allusion to, Christ. It is grotesque that the sailors should be completely insensitive to the symbolic, otherworldly perspective, and that once the sun comes out and the fog clears, they should approve of the murdering Mariner. In the vagueness of the references, the Mariner is also a Simon of Cyrene, who takes up, not the cross, but the dead albatross and hangs it round his neck, overturning the usual portrayal of Christ carrying a lamb on his shoulders. The Mariner has been a Judas, accuser of Christ as well as a Simon of Cyrene. When he plays the game of dice with the spectre, the Mariner, like Jesus in Gethsemane, drinks his blood ‘as from a chalice’. The souls of the dead sailors swish in front of him making the same sound as the cross-bow, which reminds him that he was the cause of the massacre. Having left the reader surrounded by spells and visions in the Pacific, section four abruptly returns him to

19

Serpieri 1986, 330.

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the wedding guest, who has been listening and now begins to comment on the story he has heard so far. This is a phatic element for the benefit of the lector in fabula. Going back to the story: the Mariner is a soul in agony, and, in pity, looks up to heaven and tries to pray, but in vain, because he is blocked by demonic influences. For seven days and nights he feels the weight of the curse, but just as he shot the albatross ‘unwittingly’, so now he blesses the beautiful, multi-coloured sea-snakes, and the albatross drops from his neck and plummets into the depths. As I mentioned, the ballad thins out towards the end, but not before announcing the arrival of the hermit, who, as in the case of Lady Macbeth, will wash away the blood of guilt. It remains a fact that the Mariner is looked upon by all as diabolical, and, as such, feared. The penance assigned might, however, make him seem like an apostle who, after Pentecost, has received ‘strange powers of speech’ and is capable of picking out who to tell his story to (summed up in a facile and tautological prayer); it is the community of the poor in spirit that goes to church to pray, mindful of the evangelical commandment: ‘Love God, yourselves, your neighbour and all things created’, as an act owed to divine love and to the creator. § 186. Coleridge IV: The demonic triptych II. ‘Kubla Khan’ The prose ‘notice’ placed before the text of Kubla Khan (published with Christabel in 1816, and whose textual critics have gone mad trying to date with precision – 1798, 1799 or 1800) is basically an exegesis and reduction of the poem itself; it is a confirmation of its primary isotopy, the symbolic equation between the construction and topography of the palace and the flowing of the poetic act. There are, in fact, two forewords, and in the Crewe MS, discovered only in 1934, containing the first version, there is an ‘endnote’ that differs slightly from the ‘notice’ of the second: in it we read that the dream that inspired the poem was the consequence of taking two grains of opium as a sedative. The notice of the 1816 version, instead, speaks of an anodyne substance that induced sleep in the poet as he was reading a passage from Purchas his Pilgrimage. The ‘bore from Porlock’ – who pins Coleridge down ‘for more than an hour’ in the real world, the world ‘of business’, so that only ten more lines could be added to those written down as soon as he awoke – represents all that is practical

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and incidental and, as such, renders poetic inspiration precarious and evanescent, and always subject to the dissolving action of external agents. The episode underlines the transitory nature of poetic vision – the same process described within the opulent metaphor of the poem, and repeated, almost to the letter, in the second section of the ‘young Abyssinian girl’. Both, however, are suspected of being an invention, functional to the demands of the poem. As to Coleridge’s definition of the poem – ‘a vision in a dream’ – it is still being debated, and is the same debate, after all, that is still raging as regards Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.20 Opium, taken as a sedative, in liquid form or in grains, is said by doctors to stimulate the imagination, but without the power to evoke visions ex novo. 2. On Kubla Khan, the interpretative debate has tended to be more unanimous. As in the ‘Rime’, however, it started with the question of the sources. Pagnini bows to the fanatical attention to sources, but, after paying lip-service to Lowes, shows him the door without further ado: every work that rises on sources – practically all – must recreate them; the final product constitutes something quite new and independent. Source-criticism is detrimental, as proved by the fact that, on the basis of data collected, Lowes came to the extraordinary conclusion that the poem is meaningless. Pagnini himself lists the principal interpretative approaches used so far (1984: since then more have certainly been added): a) Freudian psychoanalytical; b) symbolic-Jungian; c) autobiographical; d) political; e) aesthetic-existential. Bringing all these together is less of a problem. But Pagnini too falls into the trap of over-interpretation, though he realizes he is ‘drifting off ’; perhaps he thinks his hypotheses are suggestive but not really believable, like Stephen Dedalus’s interpretation of Hamlet in the library episode of Ulysses. The epistemological method might be preferred because, influenced by the German idealists, Coleridge symbolizes here the appearance on the earth of those dark, irrational forces of nature and of the divine-demonic elements in man. Such forces are represented as a subterranean sea that feeds a fountain which becomes a river which, in turn,

20 Volume 7, § 151.1.

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disappears underground.21 The depths have given the imagination the material, and, working together with reason, the poet achieves artistic creation. 3. An oriental monarch orders a palace to be built, a palace of pleasure, of the spirit or of the flesh, with the idea of tyranny and dissoluteness. It should not be forgotten that, for Coleridge and Wordsworth, the true purpose of poetry is pleasure – poetic pleasure, of course. The isotopy of the sacred, analogic or literal, begins with the ‘dome’ and the sacred river. If nature is luxuriant and the trees smell of incense, is the Khan one of the Magi? On the surface, the merely ‘deep’ is contrasted with the ‘abysmal’ and with ‘caverns measureless’; the palace is surrounded by an area measuring precisely ten miles, protected by towers and walls. The palace rises and the river goes down. When a chasm opens up on a hill covered with cedars, the opposition between measurable and immeasurable becomes more pronounced and the suggestions of uncontrollable force increase. The seething caverns may represent inspiration erupting from the depths; the image of the woman ‘wailing for her demon lover’ has at least two meanings, and prefigures Christabel. The chasm is watched over by the moon, while the world of the Khan is ruled by the sun. The fountain bursts forth from the chasm, where the earth is represented as toiling, moaning and suffering, as in some sacred birth. At line 25, the poem doubles back, and seems to paraphrase itself, or, rather, repeat itself, sharpening the image of the sacred river that drops into the abyss. But Kubla Khan who, above the tumult of the earth, hears echoing the sounds of war, is presumably forced to leave the pleasures of his hortus conclusus and face reality. At the end of the first movement, the whole picture of the palace, fountain, river and garden is called a ‘miracle’, in line with the language of the sacred, which oscillates between the literal and the metaphorical. The dominant rhetorical figure 21

Si parva licet, I do not believe that any of the erudite source-hunters, including Praz, have pointed out that the Prologue of Guarini’s Pastor fido recounts the myth of the river, Alpheus, and the ‘fountain Arethuse’; there are even verbal echoes. It is not impossible that Coleridge may have read and remembered it (his memory was phenomenal). Guarini was one of the most popular Italian authors in England, then as now.

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is the oxymoron: a ‘sunny’ pleasure palace with caverns of ‘ice’ (this detail is added at the end of this movement). At line 27 the scene changes abruptly when the curtain comes down on Xanadu. The poetic ‘I’ adds a section of eighteen lines that are outside the context of the opium dream recounted in the first movement, and, apparently changing the subject, it tells of another vision, seen ‘once’, of an Abyssinian girl playing a dulcimer and singing about a Mount Abora. In reality, there are two connected movements: if the poet could hear within him that mystic, transcendental music, he could rebuild the palace of Xanadu ‘in the air’. The wish is tautological or deliberately naïve: the palace has already been rebuilt in the air. The word ‘revive’ is part of the sacred or sacramental isotopy, reinforced by the last lines, in which the community acknowledges the poet as prophet, around whom a ritual triple circle is drawn, in recognition of the fact that he has tasted of divine wisdom, eaten the manna of heaven and drunk the milk of paradise. From the last line, the reader looks back to Mount Abora, and learns that Alph is, possibly, the Nile, and that Coleridge had written at first Amora, mindful of the passage in Milton where this mountain is said to be the seat of paradise. If Coleridge had really changed the letter in question, one might exclaim, paraphrasing Browning, ‘the less Coleridge he’. The phonological, structural and euphonic reasons suggested by Pagnini are less convincing. On the other hand, Coleridge had a propensity for enigmistics, as may be seen in at least one case: Sara Hutchinson was rechristened poetically as ‘Asra’. The ending of the poem can be read in two opposing ways: the inspired poet resembles the woman enamoured of her demon lover, and both are icons of the poetic imagination. But the by-standers are possessed by ‘sacred terror’, so that it may be that the triple circle is there not for protection but for exorcism. § 187. Coleridge V: The demonic triptych III. ‘Christabel’ Christabel should be read in the light of the insoluble and functional ambiguity that involves not only Geraldine, but Christabel, too, who, by entering the forest, repeats the Mariner’s adventure in the unknown. The narrative and icastic micro-elements take on unpredictably arcane meanings, forming, in the end, a huge, symbolic, neo-Gothic fresco. Christabel, too, ends abruptly and enigmatically, which is a sign that in this case, too,

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Coleridge wished to create the image of a reality that could not be reduced to one single interpretation. From this, and in this, the hermeneutic model emerges: we are, in fact, in the field of relativism, especially in the case of Geraldine’s ‘mark of shame’, ‘which can be seen and touched, but not rationalized’.22 All the dramatis personae of the poem – the animals more than the humans – become, before the reader, interpreters of the fable. In the presence of the naked Geraldine, Christabel feels the same terror as the by-standers before the poet in Kubla Khan. 2. So, reticence reigns, on both a real and symbolic level: Geraldine is not alien to Leoline’s family circle; and then, what happens during the night between her and Christabel? Why has Geraldine come to visit Christabel? Has she come to avenge her own father? What does Christabel’s mother represent? The narrator divides the text into a series of questions, and answers them, but avoids the very questions I have listed above. Geraldine comes across Christabel praying at midnight under a legendary oak tree – an improbable situation justified only in the context of some Spenserian imitation, and therefore responding to the criteria of the fantastic and medieval romance; but it is Christabel who asks Geraldine what she is doing in the wood. Part of the same romance register is the story of the five knights who have threatened to rape her, and left her there. The diabolic mark is signalled by Geraldine’s refusal to pray and thank the Virgin, whereas Christabel obeys the commandment with which the ‘Rime’ ends: she expresses her love for all created things, and, in return, is loved by the Creator. On awaking next morning, Geraldine is still more ravishing, and her clothes cling tightly to her body, showing her breasts in all their glory. On her part, Christabel, like the Mariner of the ‘Rime’, realizes she must ‘wash away her sins’. To return to the uncertain interpretation of reality that involves, above all, Sir Leoline, Christabel sees everything, but is silent, accepting premonitions and the repugnant sight of her father’s courtship of Geraldine (or, at least, his excessive benevolence towards her); the court bard tells the dream of a frightened dove in the wood, a premonition and possibly a double of Christabel, because a green snake seizes the dove in

22

Pagnini 1992.

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its jaws. The poem is unfinished; the second part ends with Christabel begging her father to send Geraldine away; he refuses. § 188. Coleridge VI: ‘Biographia Literaria’ and Shakespearean criticism Coleridge’s ‘demonic’ period ends with Christabel; ‘Dejection: An Ode’, written in 1802, the only composition that still interests the critics after the three demonic poems (though Coleridge’s poetic career was to continue for another thirty years), marks a return to an orotund, effusive lyricism that is all too explicit, and presents, in a prophetic nut-shell, a picture of the mental condition that was to characterize his last phase. The price paid was the loss of his poetic inspiration, hinted at in Kubla Khan, or the ‘agony’ to which the Mariner of the ‘Rime’ is doomed. The Eolian harp, one of the first symbols of inspiration, is only brushed by a breeze that, the poet wishes, will blow and grow until it bursts out into a regenerative tempest leading to a fresh explosion of force from within – a harp that sounds so weak were better be silent, he says, sarcastically. In the third of the eight long stanzas, the poet confesses that the creative spirits have left him, and – another icastic repetition – the fountain of passion and life has dried up. From halfway through the poem would have worked as a dialectical prompt, or even literal draft of Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations’. The loss of the ‘glory’ is, for Coleridge, the interruption of the process I mentioned above: nature offers man what man has given her by letting himself be guided by her, and vice versa.23 Only a quarter of Coleridge’s whole production was written after 1802, but it is hard to believe that, from the abundance of material at hand, the mediocre ‘Garden of Boccaccio’ and not many others should be normally singled out for quotation. In 1798 in Germany Coleridge attended lectures on philosophy, languages and theology, and had planned a biography of Lessing, which he never wrote. His return to England marked the beginning of a difficult fifteen-year period, in which his health deteriorated and the use of laudanum brought more 23

The second half is more confused and verbose than the first, and identifies in the ‘imploded’, not altogether pure, love for Sara Hutchinson (though she is never named) one of the causes of his unhappiness. The last stanza (‘’Tis midnight’) starts very much like the first stanza of Christabel.

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harm than benefits. His marriage began to creak because of his infatuation with a ‘second Sara’, Wordsworth’s sister-in-law. He went to Malta in 1805 to seek a more favourable climate, and, while he was there, worked as secretary to the English consul. On the way back to England, when passing through the south of Italy, his persecution mania led him to believe that Napoleon himself was after him. He listened to Wordsworth reading from The Prelude, but, having caught what he interpreted as offensive allusions to himself, he broke off with the Laker; they made up later, but without ever re-establishing the lost harmony. Coleridge ended up living as a guest of a Dr Gillman in his house in Highgate for eighteen years, under special surveillance, rather like Swinburne fifty years later. He became ‘the wise man of Highgate’, a proverbial figure, though he was also snubbed and caricatured by many of his contemporaries. His disintoxication from opium was never complete, and yet, in spite of periodical bouts of depression, he consolidated his fame as a writer – or, at least, as a speaker – with several fields of expertise: he translated Schiller’s Wallenstein (1800) from the MS, then went back to drama with Zapolya (1817); he founded a periodical called The Friend (1809–1810), and wrote three prose works (two of them long and structured), published before his death. These are The Statesman’s Manual24 (1816), Biographia Literaria (1817), Aids to Reflection (1825). He also wrote various essays and lecture notes, on Shakespeare and Milton,25 in particular, which were published posthumously. He practically separated from his wife in 1804, and in 1824 was awarded a pension by the Royal Society of Literature. 2. Biographia Literaria (1817) sprouted from the biography of Lessing that Coleridge planned to write when he was in Germany in 1799, but never got round to. Much of the material and ideas intended for this biography 24 Based on the assertion that the Scriptures provide those responsible for the public weal with all the instruments and doctrine necessary for steering the ship of state. It is therefore an application of symbolic and typological criticism, with the figures and cases of Biblical times transferred to contemporary history. 25 For Coleridge’s ideas on the poetry of Milton, and the differences between him and Dante and Donne, see my essay, ‘Alcune considerazioni sul ritrattismo letterario’, in IDM, 69–81, and, particularly, 71.

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was used in the preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads (1800), which Wordsworth had by now taken over. The ideas in the Biographia sprang from a radical disagreement, on Coleridge’s part, with Wordsworth’s ideas on poetry, but it was fifteen years before Coleridge got to work on it. The final idea was to turn a preface to his own collection of poems into a long essay, which became the Biographia Literaria, all the more necessary since Wordsworth, in the 1815 edition of his poems, had kicked a hornets’ nest by mixing up ‘fancy’ and ‘imagination’, much to Coleridge’s indignation. It is perhaps plausible, in the light of this background, that Coleridge, after listening to his friend’s reading from the Prelude in 1805, now intended a riposte: for a start, the Prelude should have been written in prose, and it was a factual and spiritual autobiography. Coleridge was in step with Wordsworth and followed him like a shadow. In other words, Biographia Literaria was his Prelude, with anecdotes of schooldays and old friends from university, including pictures and scenes from his stay in Germany in 1799. In reality, the book is discontinuous: it is theoretical and heuristic, but also demonstrates how certain axioms were formed empirically. The first pages read like a precocious nineteenth-century ‘school novel’, with the portrait of the teacher at Christ’s Hospital and his idiosyncratic battle against superfluous adjectives; his teaching was the seed from which sprang Coleridge’s theory of poetry as, not a translation into verse of a prose original, but a universe in itself, in which each single, microscopic textual element is essential if the whole construction is not to collapse. This teacher, Mr Bowyer, taught his pupils to be precise, above all, when writing, and to steer well clear of embellishments. Evidently Coleridge learned very little from him. Biographia Literaria is written in a hyperbolic, verbose style; it is longwinded and pedantic, with quotations from Latin and Greek in the original; the simplest concepts are hidden behind a vague, mystifying, artificial style. In short, Coleridge knows nothing about economy in expression, so that the reader is forced to be selective. For example, everything between chapter five and fifteen is redundant. At times, it is as if Coleridge were writing a parody of the style of Thomas Browne or other seventeenth-century prose writers; or as if he were imitating Sterne (he might well be, since, among the various internal self-definitions, there is one that sounds Sternian, ‘an historical sketch of my literary life and opinions’). Coleridge plays on

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this analogy from time to time, and, in one sub-heading, informs the reader that what follows will be a chapter of digressions. 3. The first four chapters are almost faithful to the chronology: they begin with his education at the grammar school, and with the birth of his passion for poetry after reading Bowles’s sonnets, which convince the precocious youth that a poetic fusion was possible between ‘heart’ and ‘intellect’. The mention of Southey leads Coleridge to lash out at reviewers that had attacked his poet friend.26 From the fourth chapter on, Wordsworth becomes the dominant presence, that is, the author of ‘loco-descriptive’ poems who revealed to him the fusion of thought and feeling that had not been seen in English literature since the time of Milton, and a poetry that had never before been heard. Chapters five to thirteen might possibly be justified by the fact that they constitute a necessary theoretical premise to the discussion of the distinction between fancy and imagination.27 With time, Coleridge had demolished and abandoned Hartley’s associationism, and embraced the German idealism that underpins this distinction. Coleridge’s theory of perception rests on the dynamic fusion of subject and object: the former being the active mind behind the process of perception, an activity which is the same, eternally generative, as God, which is almost exactly the theory of Blake.28 The theory of imagination and the illustration of its workings are exemplified by references to Shakespeare and Milton; the book ends with a point by point analysis of his disagreement with Wordsworth on poetic diction and metre. Biographia Literaria is, therefore, a militant and at the same time absolutist text: an attack on Wordsworth, at first understated, then explicit and energetic, and the formulation of an aesthetics of poetry tout court. What at first seems to be a defence or even a panegyric of Wordsworth in Chapter 4 turns into a firm but ferocious operation of demolition. When they first met, Wordsworth had seemed to

26 These were the same reviewers that had often attacked Coleridge, too, who defends himself like a martyr under a hail of arrows; this victimism comes out in the demonic poems. 27 See M. Pagnini, ‘Fancy e Imagination / Imagination e Fancy: curiosa antimetabole’ (PLE, 195–203) on the semantics of the two terms. 28 Cf. Beer 1959, 30–1, and 34, for a succinct parallel.

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him to be the epitome of the poet of the imagination, able to meld feeling and thought; but then, it began to be clear to him that Wordsworth had put into practice the distinction between fancy and imagination but had not thought it through on a theoretical level, or had simply misunderstood it. For Coleridge, the disagreement on such subjects as the relationship between poetry and prose, and on Wordsworth’s claim to have based his poetic diction on the language ‘really used by men’, was ‘radical’, so much so that debate becomes denunciation. The axiom always associated with Coleridge is the distinction between mechanical fancy and organic imagination, which can be primary or secondary; fancy takes pre-existing sense-data as they are, while imagination dissolves and resolves the differences and merges and melds whatever is different into something new, beginning with the perceiver and the perceived. Poetry, born of imagination, is an organic construct with two finalities, which Keats was to call ‘truth’ and ‘beauty’ (for Coleridge, ‘pleasure). Coleridge’s theory of imagination is, however, nothing new, but a re-phrasing of the discordia concors of the Elizabethan and late Renaissance thought: ‘balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities’. T. S. Eliot shilly-shallied about Coleridge – who had formulated before him the theory of the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ that ended with the Metaphysicals – and was not willing to attribute it to Wordsworth and the other Romantics.29 4. Textual criticism is the most problematical part of Coleridge’s prose works; it consists largely, in fact, of jottings and notes taken down by loyal listeners at his lectures; some is found in notes scribbled in the margins of books. Today he is looked upon as the greatest Shakespeare critic of all time; he certainly was exactly that in his day, far superior, in terms of intuition and preparation, to the various editors who had preceded him, especially Dr Johnson. His infatuation with Shakespeare was late in coming, probably after his German stay in 1799. The German critics had paradoxically aroused the English from a long sleep during which they had forgotten their country’s greatest genius. Coleridge denied this was the case, and, in particular, 29 The echo of ‘In the uncertain hour before the morning’ at the beginning of ‘Little Gidding’ II is striking, compared with Coleridge’s ‘Since then, at an uncertain hour’ in l. 583 of the ‘Rime’.

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rejected the accusation of having plagiarized Schlegel, saying that his ideas were already fully formed and had been aired in various lectures, before he had met Schlegel and before he knew enough of the German language to read him. Of the forty-odd lectures he gave on Shakespeare (all paid with a pittance), I shall deal briefly with those that concern his most famous tragedy. Hamlet was read by Coleridge as a ‘generalizing’ or ‘abstractive’ character who puts off revenge not so much through indolence or cowardice, as through an unresolvable imbalance between the life of the senses and intellectual fretting, carried to paroxysmal levels. The heart of Coleridge’s Hamlet criticism is a detailed, scene-by-scene commentary, aimed at bringing out the dramatic effects and intentions conveyed by the dialogue, and acting both on the characters within the play and on the external reader. Coleridge is no less attentive to the structural texture woven by a master who is often defined as ‘judicious’. His discussions of the subtle implications of this word or that are premonitory of Empson – see, for example, the four nuances found in the pun in ‘I am too much in the sun’ (I.2.67), or Hamlet’s display of wit when he calls Polonius a ‘fishmonger’, or in the following lines referring to the sun kissing the dead bodies. Inevitably, Coleridge, like every lecturer, added variations to his script whenever he repeated it, which he did in a number of talks on the subject of Hamlet and Shakespeare’s theatre. § 189. Shelley* I: Poetry to break the chains of the world Dead before he reached the age of thirty, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792– 1822) wrote and was active for about ten years, making his appearance on the literary scene in 1810 with two jejune and quite forgettable Gothic 1

*

Complete Works, ed. R. Ingpen and W. E. Peck, 10 vols, London 1926–1930, was, in its day, a worthy companion of the single-volume edition of the poetry edited by T. Hutchinson, Oxford 1904, revised by G. M. Matthews, London 1969, both historic editions now superseded by The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. D. H. Reiman, N. Fraistat and N. Crook, 3 vols, Baltimore, MD 2000–2013, and by The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. E. B. Murray, Oxford 1993–. Another complete edition of the poems is The Poems of Shelley, ed. K. Everest and G. Matthews et al., 4 vols, London 1989–2013. Letters, ed. F. L. Jones, 2 vols, Oxford 1964. There have been numberless anthologies of the poetry and prose, but the best is probably Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. D. H. Reiman and N. Fraistat, New York and London,

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2002; for an excellent parallel text version (original plus Italian translation) with introduction and notes, see Shelley. Opere, ed. F. Rognoni, Torino 1995. Life. W. M. Rossetti, Memoir of Shelley, London 1870; G. B. Smith, Shelley: A Critical Biography, Edinburgh 1877; J.  A. Symonds,  Shelley, London 1878; E. Dowden, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 vols, London 1886; W. E. Peck, Shelley: His Life and Work, 2 vols, Boston, MA and New York 1927; N. I. White, Shelley, 2 vols, New York 1940, and, abridged in one volume, 1945; E. Blunden, Shelley: A Life Story, New York 1947; I. Roe, Shelley: The Last Phase, London 1953; J. O. Fuller, Shelley: A Biography, London 1968; R. Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit, London 1974; C. Tomalin, Shelley and His World, London 1980; M. O’Neil, Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Literary Life, London 1989; J. Bieri, Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Biography, 2 vols, Newark, DE 2004–2005, and, in one volume, Baltimore, MD 2008. Criticism. A. Clutton-Brock, Shelley: The Man and the Poet, London 1910; C. Grabo, The Magic Plant: The Growth of Shelley’s Thought, Chapel Hill, NC 1936; H. C. Baker, Shelley’s Major Poetry: The Fabric of a Vision, Princeton, NJ 1948; K. N. Cameron, The Young Shelley: Genesis of a Radical, New York 1950; P. H. Butter, Shelley’s Idols of the Cave, Edinburgh 1954; C. E. Pulos, The Deep Truth: A Study of Shelley’s Scepticism, Lincoln, NE 1954; H. Bloom, Shelley’s Mythmaking, New Haven, CT 1959; M. Wilson, Shelley’s Later Poetry: A Study in His Prophetic Imagination, New York 1959, and, as editor, Percy Bysshe Shelley, New York 1985; D. King-Hele, Shelley: His Thought and Work, London 1960; E. Chinol, P. B. Shelley, Napoli 1961; R. Woodman, The Apocalyptic Vision in the Poetry of Shelley, Toronto 1964; Shelley: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. G. Ridenour, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1965; E. J. Schulze, Shelley’s Theory of Poetry: A Reappraisal, The Hague 1966; S. Reiter, A Study of Shelley’s Poetry, Albuquerque, NM 1967; J. Rieger, The Mutiny Within: The Heresies of Percy Bysshe Shelley, New York 1967; J. P. Guinn, Shelley’s Political Thought, The Hague 1969; G. M. McNiece, Shelley and the Revolutionary Idea, Cambridge, MA 1969; D. H. Reiman, Percy Bysshe Shelley, New York 1969; S. Curran, Shelley’s Cenci: Scorpions Ringed with Fire, Princeton, NJ 1970, and Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis: The Maturing of an Epic Vision, San Marino, CA 1975; E. Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading, Baltimore, MD 1971; J. W. Wright, Shelley’s Myth of Metaphor, Athens, GA 1970; J. Chernaik, The Lyrics of Shelley, Cleveland, OH 1972; K. N. Cameron, Shelley: The Golden Years, Cambridge, MA 1974; CRHE, ed. J. E. Barcus, London 1975; J. V. Murphy, The Dark Angel: Gothic Elements in Shelley’s Works, Lewisburg, PA 1975; J. O. Allsup, The Magic Circle: A Study of Shelley’s Concept of Love, Port Washington, NY and London 1976; T. Webb, The Violet in the Crucible: Shelley and Translation, Oxford 1976, and Shelley: A Voice Not Understood, Manchester 1977; L. Abbey, Destroyer and Preserver: Shelley’s Poetic Skepticism, Lincoln, NE 1979; N. Brown, Sexuality and Feminism in Shelley, Cambridge, MA 1979; R. Cronin

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novels.1 In 1811 he wrote a pamphlet ‘On the Necessity of Atheism’ which earned him expulsion from Oxford; 18132 saw the first of a series of poems that brought the attention of his fellow-countrymen to a poet who was ambitious, determined not to stay for long in the province of the short poem, but eager to tackle longer, more solemn genres in the manner of Spenser and Milton. In fact, Shelley’s main works came shortly after and were in the para-dramatic register: two tragedies divided into acts (neither of them really suited to the stage), one of them lyrical, in very varied metres, on the myth of Prometheus, the other admittedly modelled on the typical Elizabethan-Jacobean play, and in blank verse, on a scandal that rocked late sixteenth-century Rome. Of the four years spent entirely in Italy after 1818,

and P. M. S. Dawson, The Unacknowledged Legislator: Shelley and Politics, Oxford 1980; P. Foot, Red Shelley, London 1980; R. Cronin, Shelley’s Poetic Thoughts, New York 1981; M. H. Scrivener, The Philosophical Anarchism and Utopian Thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Princeton, NJ 1982; Shelley Revalued: Essays from the Gregynog Conference, ed. K. Everest, Leicester 1983; W. Keach, Shelley’s Style, New York and London 1984; A. Leighton, Shelley and the Sublime: An Interpretation of the Major Poems, Cambridge 1984; N. Crook and D. Gruton, Shelley’s Venomed Melody, Cambridge 1986; A. J. Welburn, Power and Self-Consciousness in the Poetry of Shelley, New York 1986; R. Tetreault, The Poetry of Life: Shelley and Literary Form, Toronto 1987; S. M. Sperry, Shelley’s Major Verse: The Narrative and Dramatic Poetry, Cambridge, MA 1988; B. C. Gelpi, Shelley’s Goddess: Maternity, Language, Subjectivity, Oxford 1992; Shelley e l’Italia, ed. L. M. Crisafulli, Napoli 1998; M. Pagnini, ‘Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Triumph of Life’, in PLE, 265–86 (with invaluable insights into Shelley’s whole corpus); The Cambridge Companion to Shelley, ed. T. Morton, Cambridge 2006; J. Mulhallen, The Theatre of Shelley, Cambridge 2010. 1 2

Zastrozzi and St Irvyne, in which Shelley’s future politically seditious ideas are attributed, for the sake of prudence, to ignoble figures. St Irvyne is a kind of ‘potboiler’, and was left unfinished. Several poems written at Eton had been published in 1810 with the title, Original Poetry; by Victor and Cazire; others appeared only in 1964 as the ‘Esdaile notebook’. At Oxford, Shelley and his friend, Hogg, published anonymously, in 1810, the Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson, Nicholson being a poor washerwoman who had attempted to assassinate George III in 1786. The book contains Gothic-style poems and Shelley’s first denunciation of absolute monarchy. Both his Gothic novels and these ‘Fragments’ created his reputation as an immoralist writer.

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three works stand out: a ‘Hymn’ full of pseudo-philosophical digressions, dedicated to a young Pisan woman; an elegy on the death of Keats; and The Triumph of Life in terza rima left unfinished at his death, a Dantesque adaptation as well as a refined but hallucinated parody of the Chaucerian genre of the ‘May morning dream’. Along with these, we find a whole constellation of mainly lyrical compositions which every English man, woman and child knows (but not necessarily loves) – odes and hymns, elegies and rhapsodies, sonnets and songs for music, and various fragments.3 His last published work was the essay A Defence of Poetry, an up-dated version, in a way, of the almost homonymous Defence of Poesie that Sidney had written for his fellow-countrymen 200 years earlier (Sidney was a forebear of Shelley). Shelley, like Coleridge, was unable to prepare a collected edition of his works to date because of his early, unexpected death, so it was left to his wife, Mary Shelley, to take on the task of gathering and editing his works in 1839. This is ironic, since no poet more than Shelley was so anxious to explain the poetry he was writing, and to ensure that the reader was in a position to interpret his intentions correctly. Wordsworth wrote prefaces, but these are generic considerations on poetry, whereas Shelley accompanies almost every single poem with a detailed commentary. Mary Shelley then added her own remarks, so that the 1839 edition contains not one, but two para-texts or avant-textes. Deconstruction has naturally exaggerated the discrepancy between preface (if any) and content, pointing to a ‘tranquillity’ still further in the background, of the ‘prefacer’ as distinct from the poet who writes and remembers epiphanic moments, and who does not agree, and therefore revises and gives a different version from the first draft. 2. Before Shelley, or, to be more precise, before Byron, and with some rare exception like the diarist, Montagu, English writers visited the Continent on what was called the grand tour. They seldom settled, and returned home after a question of months. Gradually, in the course of the 3

The 1904 Hutchinson edition divided the poetic corpus roughly into four sections: the long poems; the short poems presented chronologically; translations; juvenilia. Later editions have opted for a more strictly chronological presentation. Internal organizational criteria – oppositional, reflecting events and places, thematic or symbolic situations, image clusters – are found by Rognoni 1995, xxi–xxii.

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early nineteenth century, Italy was to become ‘the paradise of exiles’, whose reasons for being there went from disagreement with family, to politics, to the lower cost of living. With Shelley, the Romantic poet creates the role of the professional poet, someone, that is, who does no remunerated work, and therefore must have some other source of income, like inheritance or sponsorship. For example, Shelley struck a deal with his father for an annual allowance of £200 after he was sent down from Oxford. He was later to receive an inheritance from his grandfather and an annual income of the same amount, so that he never experienced economic hardship.4 He was no cynical exploiter, however: he chose to be a poet because he believed that poetry was indispensable to society and a sacred vocation. At the same time, Shelley inaugurates a new genre: poetry en plein air. He preferred to read or compose his verse on the banks of rivers, or in the hills, or within sight of Alpine peaks; or in the shade of trees, or in places steeped in history, like the Duomo in Florence, or the baths of Caracalla. When he arrived on the scene, there was already an abyss between him and the first generation of Romantics. Twenty-five years separated him from Wordsworth and Coleridge, and thirty-five from Blake. He was one of the few who never expressed any desire to meet Wordsworth; he referred to Coleridge as a ‘hooded eagle’, and criticized both for their conversion to conservatism after the heady enthusiasm for renewal and revolution. He did, however, strike up a friendship with Southey, who had been closely associated with, and admired by, Coleridge. Not strangely, he was nearer to Blake, poet and prophet of liberation from the ideological fetters and tyrannical power of religion and kingship.5 Along with Nerval in France, Hölderlin in Germany, Foscolo and Leopardi in Italy and Pushkin in Russia, Shelley belongs to 4

5

In Italy, the Shelleys formed, in one way, a micro-patriarchal family, consisting of the poet, his wife and two sisters-in-law (later to be reduced to one), nurses, governesses, and children, both ‘biological’ and adopted. In another way, it was not at all patriarchal: in naming the new members that were born one after the other in rapid succession, preference was given to names associated with the idea of ‘clearness’ and ‘whiteness’: Byron’s daughter was called ‘Alba’ (later changed to ‘Allegra’); Jane Clairmont asked to be called Claire, and Clara was the name of Shelley and Mary’s daughter, who died soon after being born. ‘Almost certainly’ (Rognoni 1995, 1500) Shelley did not know Blake’s prophetic poems.

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the European Olympus of pure Romanticism. These various poets never met but had in common a number of biographical elements: they all died young, they were all idealists, they were ‘wanderers’, and their metaphorical or real graves were ‘unwept’. Like Foscolo, Shelley wandered into ‘fatal’ waters, but differently to the classical (Homeric) code, the adverse fate of the Romantics decrees an odyssey without Ithaca, and death far from the native shore; a death which is dissolution of self and union with the Absolute and with Infinity. The corpse of drowned Harriet, his first wife, had surfaced, unrecognizable, near the bank of the Serpentine, a month after her death; her body was swollen, not because she was pregnant, but because she had been so long in the water. Six years later, a drowned Shelley would be washed ashore, returned to dry land by the waters of the Mediterranean; some said it was suicide, a not entirely fanciful hypothesis.6 It was 8 July 1822; the waves whipped up by a sudden squall had sunk his boat, and given back his body some days later. He was cremated, except for his heart, which was buried not far from Keats’s grave in Rome. 3. Mary Shelley maintained that Shelley had no great familiarity with old English poetry, meaning, probably, the poetry of Middle English (including Chaucer) and up to the sixteenth century. Yet his work denotes a very close relationship with the whole tradition of English poetry. Shelley has a thorough knowledge of the great poets, and takes their part in discreet but intense debates with the other Romantics. The two main modes are metrical indications and internal quotations. He employs an unusual variety of metres, which are not an end in themselves, but a silent acknowledgement of the influence of masters of the past: the Spenserian stanza, the blank verse of the playwrights, the terza rima of Dante, and, less common, the Augustan heroic couplet. Terminological recurrences are part of what linguists and formalist critics call author memory and word memory. Some terms may pass unnoticed, but others are charged with dialectical meanings, or constitute a semantic springboard, or effect a transformation in the semantic valency. They call for further discussion. In his preface to The Revolt of Islam Shelley states he does not want to ‘enter into competition’ with the greatest contemporary poets; this is, obviously, a case of denegation.

6

Cf. Rognoni 1995, cvii, and Pagnini in PLE, 285–6.

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At the same time, he incorporates and discusses the literary tradition not only of England, but of the western world: he was an outstanding translator of Homer, Dante, Calderón and Faust. Ideologically, he is a postPlatonist. Whoever imparted this philosophy to him, whether or not he was exposed to it during his short time at Oxford, the fact remains that the prime philosophical constituent element in Shelley is Platonism.7 Still further back, his reference point is Hellenic civilization, the cradle of his forma mentis. The language and contents of his entire production resonate with Greece, and Aeschylus and Sophocles specifically. This substratum merged with the philosophy of Godwin and the Enlightenment. The French Revolution impacted Shelley later, but left more lasting traces in him than in his contemporaries with the exception of Blake. In terms of most frequently used words and expressions, Shelley is the poet of chains and unchaining of slavery of all kinds – religious, social or political; he is the poet of the ‘veil’, which hides the ultimate truths of life and what lies beyond life, or, in Platonic terms, behind the world of appearances. One of the many definitions of Shelley is: ‘the poet of endless vibrations’. He desires with all his heart to be shaken by nature and her manifestations, nature always moving, always changing, which the poet re-transmits to his fellow-creatures. Of course, while nature always renews herself in a cycle of endless birth and death, man does not: all he has is a dream of eternity and of the absolute. But man, says Shelley, must not sink back into the comfort of the known, but never cease to take flight and catch the slightest breeze of change and innovation. Shelley’s version of Romanticism is centred on the subterranean force of nature that leads physical reality to ripeness and waters it like regenerating rain. Hence the celebration of the wished-for union of the transient subject with the ‘One-All’, a ‘being one with nature’, which Shelley identifies with death in Adonais. In his promiscuous secularism, he was a mystic: he did not deter or prohibit, but encouraged his first wife’s affair with his friend, Hogg; he indulged in ideal, and sometimes physical, passions, and yet his promiscuousness was an inversely puritanical application of his ideas on free love. The incest at the centre of The Cenci,

7

Ever since Yeats and his essay (1900), Shelley had been unanimously considered ‘such a good Platonist’.

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which Praz considered crucial to the Romantic aesthetic of the ‘Medusan beauty’, is in reality a test of a daring theological pronouncement: the justification of the murder of someone guilty of a crime against nature. Mary Shelley wrote that the guiding principle of her irenic, optimistic, perfectionist husband was that man can rid his nature and creation of evil. The mature Shelley views less optimistically an equal conflict between good and evil in human nature. 4. Shelley’s ‘demonization’ began early; the son of a conservative aristocrat, he reacted against his family and upbringing by declaring himself a democrat, philanthropist and atheist, thus shocking the philistine society of the day. The publishers of his first poems risked incrimination; he seduced a girl of sixteen and eloped with her to Edinburgh, then married her, not once, but twice, to make sure the union was lawful. When he invited Harriet to form an extended family – or perhaps a harem – he was only putting into practice Godwin’s philosophy: living together without true love was against his principles. Harriet’s suicide left no apparent mark on him.8 He was avoided by people, and looked upon as a hard-hearted, wicked, nogood scoundrel; only Byron stood up for him and praised his humaneness. On the outside, frail and ephebic, inside he was strong and solid. Lamb and Hazlitt, no slaves to prejudice, disapproved of him, and Peacock, formerly a friend of his, attacked him, and the whole Romantic movement with him, in The Four Ages of Poetry and in the character of Scythrop in one of his conversation novels. For much of the early nineteenth century, admiration for Shelley was a jealously concealed cult. The young Browning was deeply influenced by him.9 Until the dawning of Aestheticism, he was the favourite target of Victorian mid-term aesthetic and poetic theories,

8 9

But cf. Sperry 1988, 19. For two years Browning was a disciple and preacher of Shelley’s atheism, and, like Shaw after him, practised vegetarianism as prescribed in Queen Mab, until his mother forced him to repudiate this ‘scandalous passion’ (Volume 4, § 109.2). Browning coined for Shelley the ambiguous metaphor of ‘Sun-treader’, meaning ‘he who walks in the sun’ – with a reference to his ethereal idealism – and ‘he who treads or tramples on the sun’, in the sense of the Christian God. Browning returned to Shelley in the four stanzas of ‘Memorabilia’, where he recalls his unchanged devotion to the poet in several touching images, such as an eagle’s feather found by chance lying on the heath.

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on the basis of the label of ‘immature poet’ coined by Mills, and redoubled by Arnold. The latter exemplifies the supremacy of ideas as the most important norm of Victorian aesthetics and the kind of assessment criteria it originates: lack of ideas, of an ‘intellectual atmosphere’ – ‘not knowing enough’ – these are the reasons why Arnold demotes Romanticism to the position of a minor episode in the European literary mainstream. The twentieth century endorsed and added to Arnold’s strictures.10 In this most anti-Romantic of centuries, up to the Second World War, his principal detractors were T. S. Eliot and, later, F. R. Leavis.11 Naturally, Shelley, with his wild, luxuriant imagery and electrically ‘shocking’ epiphanies, is diametrically opposed to the kind of poetry in which a precisely defined thought interpenetrates an emotion and gives it structure. In this sense, it is tempting to see in him some degree of ‘consanguinity’ and identity with the Metaphysicals, especially the later ones, and to hear echoes of Crashaw in Epipsychidion.12 Even today, his detractors or lukewarm admirers complain of his lack of humour, his ‘weak grasp upon the actual’,13 the airiness of his

10

11

12

13

Except, naturally, for Yeats and his 1900 essay, ‘The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry’, which anticipates various points of future deconstruction. Yeats’s essay emphasizes the motifs of intellectual beauty as pivot and acting agent, of time which fades into Eternity, epiphanized only to the dying and the dead, who therefore return to life, and placing Shelley on a par with those mystics (traditionally Irish) that have the power to go beyond the ‘painted veil’ that represents life. Just as groundbreaking has been the study, in Jungian terms, of Shelley’s symbols that rise from the depths of the Great Memory (cavern, fountain, river, tower, moon and sun, this latter a positive and negative symbol). The Italian reception is well summarized by PSL, 455, revised and updated in Rognoni 1995, cxi–cxiv. Essays and books on Shelley were written by poets and critics of the calibre of Carducci, Pascoli, D’Annunzio, A. de Bosis, A. Galletti and M. Renzulli (of the latter see the valuable La poesia di Shelley, Foligno-Roma 1932). For this parallel, see JEL, 89–90. T. S. Eliot (cf. § 16.2) had already pointed out this analogy, and in Italy it was E. Cecchi who extended it in his chapter on Shelley in Grandi romantici inglesi (1915), which, however, can nowadays be read only as an example of what the Italian critical style used to be like in the early twentieth century. The famous stricture pronounced by F. R. Leavis, who took it verbatim from Walter Bagehot’s 1856 essay, ‘Percy Bysshe Shelley’: ‘His intellect did not tend to the strong grasp of realities’.

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imagery and the futility of any attempt at critical exploration applied to a kind of poetry that should only be read, and absorbed, ‘ecstatically’. As a rule Shelley does not follow the simplest expressive route, but chooses a spasmodic formulation overflowing with circumlocutions, finally drowning in the superfluous and in the tautological.14 The criterion sometimes invoked, that of transforming the poetic thought into prose – if we were, once again, to pay heed to Goethe – seems not to work at all well. On the other hand, Shelley has always had his champions: George Eliot, Hardy, Yeats, Auden, Forster and Virginia Woolf. § 190. Shelley II: Action and introspection in the early Shelley Eighteen-year-old Shelley donned the robes of the Promethean liberator in the case of Harriet Westbrook, a school friend of his sister’s and daughter of a wealthy coffee-house owner, and who Shelley believed was tyrannized by her father. Harriet was good and well-meaning, but she was no intellectual, as Shelley had deluded himself she was. Soon, though just married to Harriet, he was involved in a ‘friendship’ with a soul-mate, Elizabeth Hitchener. Once he had got rid of his university friend, Hogg, who had taken to courting Harriet in Edinburgh, where she and Shelley had got married, he frequented Southey for a short time, but soon distanced himself. In 1812, in London, he became an ever more integral part of Godwin’s ‘magic circle’. One of the first repercussions of this was a ‘political mission’ to Ireland to stir up support for the Catholic emancipation movement; he then went to Wales, where, with the help of one of his servants, he gave himself heart and soul to handing out leaflets for the same cause. By now watched at a distance by the authorities, he wrote various inflammatory pamphlets, including one on the freedom of the press. Some critics have denied that Shelley was particularly precocious given that he was already twenty-one when he wrote Queen Mab in 1813; but this is to ignore his organizational skill which led to the planning of large, important poems in a kind of rapt challenge to the status quo. At the same time, Queen Mab contains the first sign of Shelleyan intertextuality in the evident reference 14 For Pagnini (in PLE, 265–86) the metaphorical chains are always approximate and have a semiotic significance: ‘the inability of language to reach the Absolute’.

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to the soliloquy of Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet; but with the addition of a quotation from Spenser, because the queen is indeed a ‘Fairy Queen’,15 and the first part of the poem presents a pleasing Spenserian pageant. The dizzying ascent through the stars ends with the arrival of the spirit of Ianthe (the name the Shelleys gave to their first daughter) in a kind of Coleridgian ‘dome’, where ‘immutable nature’ impedes abandonment to ‘all pleasurable impulses’ and where Ianthe, on the contrary, will learn ‘to make others happy’, after the fairy has evoked visions of the past, present and future in a kind of historical fresco, seen from above – a vast, dark, phantasmagoric oration that illustrates the supremacy of death and the vanity of human ambitions. It is as if Shelley had revised and embellished with images the pamphlets he was writing against the thirst for wealth, egoism, war, absolute monarchies, and revealed and, especially, institutionalized religion, considered as so many capital sins. However, the same fantastical synthesis will echo through the last phase of his poetic career, in the unfinished The Triumph of Life. So as to avoid misunderstanding, Shelley added to Queen Mab numerous notes from which Browning learned of the necessity of vegetarianism, read incitements to indulge in free love, was appraised of the need to allow divorce once there was no true love to bind the couple, and felt the first stirrings of biblical new criticism which he was to fight at length (Browning read one of the pirate editions that, surrounded by an air of scandal, began to appear in 1821). As Shelley’s fame grew, Queen Mab became the Chartists’ bible after 1830. In 1814, Shelley reverted to prose with a rebuttal of deism and the thesis that atheism is the only outcome possible for those in search of faith.

15

Some references are obvious and unequivocal: the fairy is endowed with ‘faultless symmetry’, an inverted allusion to Blake’s ‘fearful symmetry’, further driven home by the fact that the new-born Ianthe could, with her gentleness, tame ‘the tiger’s rage’. Later, the fairy foresees a time when man’s ‘perfect symmetry’ will be spotless. ‘The harmony and happiness of man / Yields to the wealth of nations’ is, of course, a polemical reference to the title of the treatise by Adam Smith. Gray is present whenever mention is made of the faceless poor, among whom Milton or some Newton might be waiting to emerge.

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2. In Alastor16 (1816) we see once again Shelley’s concern that his poetry should be addressed to the intended reader. A preface does not simply present the poetic message to the reader, but explains it beforehand. So, the poet says, what you are about to read is an allegory of the soul and of the mind of the poet, which aspires to ever greater knowledge, possessed and absorbed, of the other than self until, dissatisfied, he invents a phantasm, or other self, which acts like the pool for Narcissus. The quest does not quench his thirst for knowledge, and he descends, drained of strength, into the grave. This is an example of early Shelleyan poetics, and, at the same time, a vision of the poet and his reaction when diagnosed with terminal TB. It seems, but it is only appearance, that Shelley has silenced his voice of protest, abandoned the crusade for the liberation and rebirth of humanity, and left behind him the ‘legal’ style that Edmund Blunden speaks of: indeed, it is a statement of self-accusation and the nemesis of solipsism, for now brought to heel, but still ready to bite.17 The death sentence is meted out by the acceptable double of that very defunct God (before Nietzsche), and given as dead in Queen Mab: the notes make clear that Shelley believed, not in the ‘historical’, anthropomorphic God of the Bible, but in ‘a pervading spirit, co-eternal with the universe’. Punishment lies in wait for anyone exempting himself from solidarity with his fellow-men and living in sterile, frustrating, morbid passiveness. With a capital letter, it becomes the or a Power. It is the Power, which controls the weather and therefore life and death too, that strikes him. The story of the poet/Shelley is narrated by an external voice which belongs to a second, later Shelley, who observes 16

It should be remembered that ‘Alastor’ is the name, not of the poet, who remains anonymous, but of his ‘wicked genie’. 17 Coleridge’s Kubla Khan would seem to be the source of both the Arab maiden who lovingly takes care of the poet in his wanderings, and her successive mental simulacrum, the veiled girl, who represents the incarnation of the poetic essence. The instrument played by the maiden is a ‘dulcimer’; on re-awaking, the vision disappears, as in Coleridge. What is left is a mirage pursued by land and sea. At the end of the long journey down the river by boat, the poet finds himself in a dream valley full of luxuriant vegetation and scents that approach the nauseating; in this entangled, ‘sublime’ natural environment, he follows a stream that descends into an ‘endless void’.

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from a distance and speaks in a kind of Wordsworthian ‘tranquillity’.18 ‘Prince Athanase’ is an unfinished poem, about another double of a solipsist searching, in vain, it eventually transpires, for his soul-mate (she does in fact appear when he is on his death bed): the poem proceeds expeditiously in terza rima, used by Shelley for the first time.19 3. A second trip to the Continent20 came in 1816: Shelley spent two months at Villa Diodati in Geneva with Byron and his lover, Claire Clairmont, and her half-sisters, Mary Godwin and Fanny Imlay. The Alpine scenery inspired two of his most important poems of 1816, the dialectically complementary ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’21 and ‘Mont Blanc’. The former laments a ‘power’ behind the visible world, which, in the guise of a bird, comes and goes, disappearing and re-appearing like the Platonic shadow of some invisible entity. It is the spirit of beauty, forever fleeting save for brief moments that cannot, however, dispel the doubt or certainty of ceaseless becoming. This fleetingness makes man less semi-divine. Four stanzas – at times repetitive – are followed by a fifth in which, after echoing Coleridge’s conversation poems, Shelley imitates Wordsworth with a recollection of himself as a child, who, eager to come into contact with spiritual beings, conceived the idea of the quest for the spirit of beauty, intimately connected with the struggle of Progress against slavery. ‘Mont Blanc’ is a compact five-act tragedy in five stanzas. Proverbially Romantic (see, above, my remarks on the general features of Romanticism) is the metaphor of the life of the psyche as a basin that gathers sense images from the outside, on which internal images are projected in a kind of exchange mechanism. External reality breaks in, increasing the volume of sounds and the intensity of colours. In a poem that consists of abrupt changes of scene, the valley of the Arve is sumptuously described in the irrepressible

18

The contorted, sibylline ending quotes the last line of Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations Ode’, and invites the reader to weep only for those who have died ‘manfully’, leaving ‘human affairs’ different to what they were. 19 Athanase discovers that the ideal woman is a mortal, sensual version of Venus. 20 Shelley had already been there once before in 1814, with Mary and Claire. 21 A recurrent conceptualization, ‘ideal’ as for Athanase, more or less in opposition to physical beauty.

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dynamism that pervades it; in the presence of this spectacle, Shelley evokes ‘fancy’, which is not Coleridge’s ‘imagination’, judging by the fact that he receives these sights ‘passively’, although he maintains a two-way exchange with the scenery in question. The last three sections either contradict or correct themselves: the third states that the great mountain teaches lofty, consoling thoughts, although it remains a mystery for most people; in the fourth, nature, far from being benign, is sadistic, dark, destructive, threatening, a river that sweeps away everything in its path. Mont Blanc is, in synthesis, the Power that underlies creation, the unsullied whiteness of the snow on its top.22 On his return to England, after both Fanny Imlay and his abandoned wife, Harriet, had committed suicide, Shelley settled in Marlow, on the Thames, and there wrote several other political pamphlets and the first version of The Revolt of Islam (1817), in Spenserian stanzas. The poem interweaves two sensitive subjects – incest and an attack on religion – that induced the author to re-publish it under another name (the original title was Laon and Cythna), without the incest, and with changes to several parts of the text. This, too, was an allegory (there was no need to abjure the revolutionary impulse, though the French Revolution had degenerated into violence and blood) aimed at a wider public, and therefore based on a ‘romantic’, fairy-tale model that was easy to understand. In fact it was a deliberately naïve reworking of the chivalric poem, which, in certain phases is as improbable, approximate and ‘estranging’ towards its stereotypes as Byron’s Don Juan.23 In the preface, Shelley observes that, 22

23

Behind the poem are Buffon’s theories on the imminent return of an ice age, which, seventy years later, terrorized Ruskin too (Volume 6, § 48.3–4). The last three lines, of proverbial complexity, state the following: if the human mind were not capable of creating from silence and solitude, then the power of Mont Blanc would be meaningless. ‘Mont Blanc’ is yet another demonstration of Shelley’s intertextuality, since it is an answer to Coleridge’s hymn, composed ‘before Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouni’, which ends by saying that it is impossible to be an atheist after seeing that valley of  ‘signs and wonders’. Shelley wrote ‘atheist’ after his name in the hotel registers in this very same place in France. The two lovers are champions of liberty: Cythna is kidnapped and Laon finds himself chained to a column (preannouncing Prometheus), and half mad. A Coleridgian hermit sets him free and feeds him; seven years later, the young man goes back to the

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unlike the Spenserian stanza, blank verse demands continuity; ‘there is no shelter for mediocrity; you must either succeed or fail’. § 191. Shelley III: ‘Prometheus Unbound’ and ‘The Cenci’ In March 1818, Shelley, hoping to improve both his health and his economic situation, moved to Italy with his wife, his sisters-in-law and his household staff, settling first in Tuscany, in Bagni di Lucca, then in the Veneto region, in Este, in a villa Byron found for him. In the following four years he moved around the country, spending time in Naples, Rome, and many other places. The almost immediate result of his arrival in Italy was two series of medium-length poems and self-contained lyrics, inspired by places he had lived in or visited, none of which failed to send messages that seemed to underline the parallel between him as an exile and the political slavery of Italy itself: in both cases, the situation was serious, but not desperate. 2. In ‘Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills’, or, more precisely, from Petrarch’s refuge, the mariner, convinced by a mirage that there are ‘flowering islands’ in the stream, and, reaching them in his boat, scrutinizes the airy panorama round him and grieves for Venice and Padua and their decline, telling them ‘break your chains, or die!’ modulating into the hope of a general renewal of the world. The two characters of Julian and Maddalo gilded city, where he leads a peaceful demonstration against the tyrant, Othman, who immediately takes countermeasures. Laon is saved by Cythna (he does not recognize her) who was active in the city preaching a message of virtue and justice. The seventh book, in which Cythna tells Laon what has happened to her since they were parted, is full of the most marvellous, and improbable, adventures. In the rest of the poem, the absolutist Islamic regime is re-instated with the overly hasty ideological support of the Spanish priests; the two heroes are burnt at the stake, their souls ascending to the temple of the spirit. The prologue presents the battle between good and evil in the form of the typically Shelleyan image of an eagle attacked by a snake; the story is then told in the first person, post mortem, as it were, by Laon. The plot is said to have been ‘borrowed’, if not plagiarized, from Owenson’s The Missionary (§ 166.2), further charged with significance in Shelley by his covertly incestuous relationship with his sister, Elizabeth. Rosalind and Helen (written and published in 1819) is a pastoral version of the themes of brother-sister incest and free-love.

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(1818) represent Shelley and Byron: Julian gives a first-hand account of his visits to a ‘madman’ who has been locked up in an asylum because of a failed love-affair: we see him as he plays the piano, his hair wet with rain, his crazed mumbling gradually petering out; but this epiphanic flash is followed by a long, delirious lament that sounds like an involuntary parody of the sentimental novel. Except for this, the work strikes one as being quite fresh and unusual: a narrative poem in the Byronic style, spoiled, however, by debate scenes which are not always clear and often tedious. In short, didacticism outweighs dialogue and soliloquy. 3. The central, crucial works of Shelley’s entire oeuvre, both chronologically and in importance, as well as for length and time taken to write them, are the semi-dramatic and dramatic Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci. These are works that differ in subject, historical time, genesis and genre (one of them is mythological-fantastic, while the other is based on a well-documented historical fact), but are complementary as metaphors of indomitable human (and superhuman) courage, and the utopian but enduring struggle against tyranny in all its forms – metaphysical and ontological, or concrete and historical. In the two vastly different contexts, Jupiter is paralleled in Count Cenci. Both are indubitably noble works, much loved by Shelley, and yet, for all that, perhaps over-estimated: one of them suffers from a certain paucity of action compared with the sheer lyricism of its verse; the other is, from a dramatic viewpoint, unconvincing and colourless. In his search for a suitable subject, Shelley thought of the classics, the Bible, even some more modern character or theme; for a while he contemplated using Tasso or the Book of Job. In the end he chose Prometheus because, as soon as he arrived in Italy, he had set to translating Plato’s Symposium. The theme of the benefactor punished, then breaking free, had been in his mind for some time. He insisted that his Prometheus was not an imitation but an audacious re-writing of the story. The tragedy by Aeschylus, the only part completed of a planned trilogy on the figure of Prometheus, ends with the reconciliation between Zeus and Prometheus in order to ward off the threat to his power represented by his marriage to Tethys. Shelley rejects the last-minute salvation of Zeus, and instead has him dethroned, although Prometheus revokes his curse and ceases to hate the monarch of the skies. Interaction with Milton is admitted and even emphasized in the preface,

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where Prometheus is presented as the real benefactor of humanity, and superior to Satan because he acts, driven, not by ambition but by altruism. He does not seek self-aggrandizement. At the same time, Shelley exploits the involuntary Christological premonitions in Aeschylus when Hephaestus thrusts a nail in Prometheus’ chest, thus, in a way, crucifying him; Zeus mocks, while Prometheus moans on his ‘cross’, protesting against his unjust punishment. In Aeschylus, a second agony takes place in the Caucasus with the eagle that, every three days, comes to eat Prometheus’ liver. Naturally, in Aeschylus, Heracles breaks the bronze chains, Prometheus’ body remains fixed to the rock, but his soul is freed and flies away. Shelley was aware that his re-writing of the story would please only a small elite – people like Hunt, Peacock, Hogg, Godwin, Keats, Horace Smith,24 Moore and Byron – and advised his publisher not to print more than twenty copies, although the reviews were not overly negative. His Prometheus presents a thematic and harmonic pattern, rather than a solid, strictly diegetic texture. The first three acts are slightly disjointed, one from the other, and trace a gradual fading of the protagonist; a fourth act was added, constituting a small but significant intrusion. There is little action in what is an essentially evocative, re-evocative and vocative play, or ‘lyrical drama’, closely related to music – it might be seen as a great opera libretto, with arias and recitatives – with ever-changing metrical forms, rhymed and unrhymed. If Prometheus does belong to any particular subgenre, it is the drama for voices, and its nearest model is Paradise Lost: there is the same solemn, full-bodied sound, the frequent use of compounds, and the Satanic vibrations – as also in Milton’s Comus or any of the numerous Jacobean masques, with their often spectacular sets. The parallel with an opera libretto is particularly cogent in the premonitions of Wagner (the three ocean nymphs that act as heralds and servants – think of the Valkyries – of the semi-divine hero, and that, in the fourth act, lie sleeping in Prometheus’ cave). 4. The curse on Prometheus is ambiguous and nuanced: it is the curse of a post-Milton Satan, a benefactor, that is, protesting against a Satanic God who, solitary and misanthropic, hates the creature he has created; it is also the curse of a Christ who wishes that ‘the cup may pass from [him]’. 24 Together with his brother, James, Horace Smith (1779–1849) was a famous humorist and author of parodies of their contemporaries, the Romantic poets.

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When Prometheus refuses to reveal the secret he guards to thwart the fall of Zeus, he draws upon himself further, more painful torture: the furies arrive in mass, sadistically looking forward to their sport. However, good spirits, too, arrive, and then leave. In the whole of the second act, Prometheus is dreamt of and described by the oceanides, Asia and Panthea, but never appears on the scene. Asia confronts Demogorgon in his cave, and the story is repeated of how Prometheus gave wisdom to Zeus. Demogorgon was not taken from Aeschylus and re-invented as the son of Jupiter who dethrones him. Beneath is the Shelleyan idea that, in the end, good will come of evil because evil is self-destructive.25 In other words, the question is whether Jupiter himself is not subjected to some higher power – maybe Fate. These are unfathomable mysteries, says Demogorgon, a kind of Sibyl, of whom the oceanide asks questions that receive sibylline answers. Zeus dethroned is paralleled in Prometheus unbound, who, together with all his following, repairs to a cave – the conversion of the sublime heroic motif into a precocious Biedermeier, very similar to the real life-style of Shelley-Prometheus, surrounded by his various handmaids (his wife and his worshipping sistersin-law). From a political point of view, this migration – with Prometheus’ refusal to take the place of Zeus – signifies that Prometheus too, had he become an absolute monarch, would inevitably have become corrupted. The ‘painted veil’, which was believed to contain the whole of life, is lifted; this authentically epiphanic moment ends with man regaining his freedom. Choruses and songs celebrate the complete regeneration of the world: ‘Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man / Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless / Exempt from awe, worship, degree’. 5. Shelley was less sure about what he himself thought of The Cenci (1819). He felt less for it than he did for Prometheus Unbound; he admitted in a letter that he did not think much of it, and that it was ‘a secondary thing’. Perhaps he was disguising the anxiety common to all poets that have no control over their audience; he, instead, wanted to reach as many ears as possible, and tried to do this with a story more suited to the sensation novel, a genre that was just round the corner. The actual incident behind the play (Count Cenci’s incestuous rape of his daughter, who retaliated by planning 25

As Mary Shelley believed, evil is only an ‘accident’; an act of human will power is sufficient to destroy it.

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his murder) took place in 1599, and was still remembered with horror in Rome when Shelley was there. In the play, he refrains from plumbing the depths of degradation of the story, and does not even use the word ‘incest’ in the text; the plot is built on discreetness, allusion and periphrasis. A few factual data were modified. Shakespeare was said to have planned a drama on the same story; after Shelley many other writers from Europe (including Italy), some of them famous, have offered their own versions of Beatrice Cenci’s tragedy. Shelley thought the play could be quite easily staged, and even had a renowned actress of the day in mind for the main role; but he was deluding himself. The idea of an immediate or planned performance was shelved, not only because of obvious dramatic deficiencies. The five acts do not exactly fly by; the construction is heavy and some characters are far from memorable. The main reason, however, why the play was not staged was the subject of incest; other controversial issues are its apparent atheism, its attack on religion and patriarchy. The first performance took place much later, in a private house in England, in 1886. The stylistic register is, of course, the exact opposite of the one used in Prometheus: plain and simple, near to metaphorical zero. But that itself was a parodic choice. The Cenci, too, is full of echoes worked into the text: the Gothic merges with the Jacobean. The Gothic here is the early form, macabre and creepy, the kind that acted as a vehicle for the representation of unnatural vices, for example in the trope-deficient works of Webster or Middleton, so stylistically bare compared with Shakespeare. The recent Gothic of Mrs Radcliffe and Walpole is present especially in the fourth act, which takes place (in defiance of verisimilitude) in the Apulian castle of Petrella (Apulia is a long way from Rome!), situated on the top of a rock near a ‘sublime’ ravine. The Cenci is not a political or philosophical drama; anyone trying out interpretative keys has to use considerable imagination. Count Cenci just cannot be seen as an atheist or agnostic above the concepts of good and evil, or as a despot, the epitome of tyranny, or as a Satanic challenger who believes himself to be beyond the law. Where does a father’s hatred of his children come from? What is the secret origin of incest? There can only be an evasive answer: the hatred is pure and metaphysical.26

26 This is the conjecture in Rognoni 1995, 1557.

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6. Beatrice’s countermove derives from the fact that a Lucretian god seems not to govern the world any more, or is abstracted, and allows crimes to go unpunished; so she thinks that she, Beatrice, may have been chosen as the instrument of divine vengeance. She personally expounds and defends her crime: all she has done is to hurry Cenci on his way to God’s judgement. From this point of view, she declares herself innocent, and simply liberated from a burden that weighed down upon her. Her plan of deadly vengeance is put into action with the help of a prelate, who is in love with her, and advises her to hire two bungling killers, who fail, not once but twice, to murder the count, echoing the scenes in Shakespeare in which an apparently determined killer gets cold feet when the time comes to act. § 192. Shelley IV: Other ‘Italian’ poems It might be hypothesized – only in the end to be denied – that, by 1819, Shelley had exhausted, or considerably muted, his revolutionary ardour, and adapted his political and historical vision to the geographical context he now found himself in (or vice versa), at the same time reacting indirectly to the news from England and from the rest of the Continent, such as the liberal revolution in Spain in 1820 (and hoped-for repercussions in the whole of Europe) and Greece’s war of independence from Turkey. On a formal level, it is a period of experiments, with old models used for newly defined contents and purposes, like the quatrain of two rhymed couplets, or alternating rhyme, the heroic couplet, Italian ottava rima, the nine-line Spenserian stanza, Dante’s terza rima or the sonnet form. ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’ gives a sideways glance at the Horatian epistle, and quotes openly from Pope’s imitations.27 Shelley abandons, for the moment, at least, the genre of the ‘large’ poem, which requires long gestation, and turns to shorter composition – some bitter, biting satires, oneiric tales of fancy, elegies, odes and hymns; not to mentions allegories.28 Many of these works were extemporaneous, and Shelley tended to dismiss 27 A Coleridge-like ‘conversation poem’, especially in the second part, where Shelley imagines pleasant get-togethers with his London friends and colleagues. 28 He was also a translator – notably of several scenes from Goethe’s Faust. He planned a translation of the entire Commedia by Dante, but all that has come down to us of that is a passage from Purgatorio.

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them and have them published anonymously. The fact is, he was a poet of ideas and opinions, and in these he was far from moderate or diplomatic, so that when his poems were published they were often met with hostility by reviewers, and he was advised not to publish them at all. The traditional literary sequence of conception, publication and reception was becoming increasingly complicated for him, as for all exiles. He wrote without any clear idea of the reading public he was addressing; once he had finished a poem, he was keen to have it published as soon as possible; his intermediary at Ollier’s, the London publisher, was Peacock, who proofread and took various liberties in doing so. Some individual works were even published in Italy, in a small number of copies for an even smaller audience. All this later poetry is characterized by being relatively easy to read: the symbolic tales are syntactically sharper, clearer and more flowing, much less contorted than his earlier works, though the stylistic transparency did not always mean that the contents, too, were plain-sailing. But, in any case, they can be read and appreciated without necessitating any in-depth investigation. The dense, intense, sometimes verbose style becomes lighter and airier. The prophetic bard of the sublime, ecstatic vision stoops at times to self-irony and humour, at times to grief, but especially to a child-like, fable mode. In a way, Shelley’s production after 1819 is a kind of poetic diary, filtered and sublimated, or a kaleidoscope. Little subchapters are inserted into the various stages of his journey through Italy, first longitudinal, covering the historic places of the dorsal mountain range of the Apennines, giving preference to the Tyrrhenian coast as a means of access. It is as if Shelley were possessed by various genii loci, a mighty allegorical tremor pervading the whole of the created world, much like the one that had spurred him to write Prometheus in Rome. After the tireless touring of the first year, the next three were spent all in one place, or almost – it was actually a kind of ‘on the spot motum perpetuum’ – above all in Tuscany. At the same time, the places he visited interacted with the Italian literary works that had been written there, and with the local political and artistic history: everything went into the poetic crucible. Every stage of his Italian wanderings leads to a masterpiece, great or small, the fruit of Shelleyan fusion or interpenetration of an unchanging, though slightly less intense pre-existing philosophical or personal ideal with the actual circumstances in which the poet found

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himself. A comparison might be drawn with the more sedentary Joyce who, exactly a century later, was to exploit the smallest details of everyday life and their associations; everything – places, history, and casual acquaintances – was grist to his literary mill. Now, the question is: are these last poems of his the ‘real’ Shelley, the one destined to live on and be appreciated for as long as human beings actually read? If the answer is yes, then it follows that in these last four years, the ‘Italian period’, at least two distinct phases may be seen, and that the greatest part of his poetic energy went into the last ‘esoteric’ works. Critics until very recently have been divided on this point: some are mercilessly negative towards the poet who, after a period of inactivity, or reduced fervour owing to various circumstances, was climbing once more back to the very peak of his poetry, producing, in the summer of 1822, the most exquisite of his poems; on the other hand, anti-Romantics like Leavis and T. S. Eliot not only allowed no mitigating circumstances for the last poems, but pronounced them confused, structureless and conventional. Now that the controversy has cooled, the last poems are recognized for what I think they are: pure poetry, devoid of complex philosophical thought and the twists and turns of ideological argumentation. 2. Shelley’s satire, objectively speaking the least read and appreciated of his works, functions by remaking previous satires. Wordsworth’s famous churlish country potter, Peter Bell, is not redeemed: on the contrary, he is condemned to hell in a no-nonsense ballad that smacks of the Augustans, and even of Swift.29 The farce of a law (approved in 1820 with a very small majority in the House of Lords but withdrawn in the Commons), which would have allowed George IV to divorce his Consort, Caroline of Brunswick, provided Shelley with the inspiration to write an irreverent, Aristophanesque phantasmagoria, which, as soon as it was published, had to be withdrawn to avoid a charge of lèse-majesté.30 His militant compositions 29 Peter Bell III. 30 Oedipus Tyrannus; or Swellfoot the Tyrant, a bloody play in which the queen, Iona Taurina, is accused of adultery (which, if proved, might have enabled George IV to obtain a divorce); the British subjects are a herd of underfed pigs who take the side of the queen and threaten rebellion (in the historical reality, most of the country,

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used allegory and personification: The Mask of Anarchy,31 rough-grained and unsubtle, was suggested by the massacre of Peterloo, where, as I have mentioned before, about a dozen factory workers were killed by soldiers during a peaceful demonstration in August 1819. Shelley ‘crucifies’ the minister, Castlereagh, for giving the order to shoot. The divertissement, The Witch of Atlas, behind an appearance of playfulness and fantastical magic, is, in fact, a re-formulation of the familiar Shelleyan programme for the establishment of a new golden age of freedom. In the course of the poem, the beautiful witch gives birth to a hermaphrodite, whose wings are invaluable in travelling up-stream in a kind of bateau ivre; she reaches a new dwelling in the air, then travels round the world peering into the disturbed dreams of men and women, and doing good deeds everywhere. In Florence, in the autumn of 1819, Shelley, who usually found inspiration in instances of the sublime in nature, saw, at the Uffizi Gallery, a head of Medusa, thought to be by Leonardo before being attributed to an unknown Flemish artist. In this head, Shelley saw an expression of the dread, horrific aspects of ethereal beauty. It was in Florence that he wrote his most famous poem, the ‘Ode to the West Wind’, apparently representing a funeral cortège of dead leaves, which, whirled about by the wind, are hastened to their graves: the Zephyr that follows the west wind is in fact the trumpet blast of Resurrection. The apocalyptic images still have a faint militant echo about them: there is, in the world, an inexhaustible force capable of ‘re-awaking’, by means of

31

including the radicals, was on the side of the Queen). In the background, the Peterloo massacre and the rumours of Malthusian eugenics are used to balance the budget. The register is loud and ludic, in line with Shelley’s original, radically militant side. He got the idea of the poem from a pig market held outside his house in San Giuliano, near Pisa, where he was staying in 1819. There is a creative Italian translation by G. D’Elia, Bari 2004, entitled Piedone il tiranno. Published by Hunt only in 1832, the year of the very Reform Bill the Manchester workers had been demonstrating for. This satirical, ironic ‘Triumph’ is in part visionary, and the idea will be completely transfigured in his last work, The Triumph of Life. On the different, if not exactly opposite, positions expounded by Shelley in his pamphlet of the same period, ‘A Philosophical View of Reform’, cf. Rognoni 1995, 1475–1476.

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‘wingèd seeds’32 (the ‘force’ is also sexual, as suggested by this surreal image, which was to inspire Dylan Thomas).33 On a formal level, the pronominal evocation, or ‘apostrophe’ (‘O thou’), is separated from the verb by a series of digressions and embellishments in each of the first three stanzas until the pattern fades: there is also a repetition of the age-old concept (present also in Hopkins) of a tempestuous end of the world, conveyed by the use of images pertaining to burial. Yet Wordsworth is present in the nostalgia for the lost union between child and nature (and the spirit of the wind). The re-establishing of this union will become a battle-hymn addressed to mankind. The ending of the poem assures it of its place in Shelley’s poetry hailing regeneration. 3. ‘The Sensitive Plant’ was written in Pisa immediately afterwards; based on the ‘myth’ of the sensitivity of vegetable life, it refers to earlier, analogous poems by other writers. It reads like a simplified fable, its structure submerged by a flood of images and stratified similes that are inserted between subject and verb as secondary clauses. It might be called Pre-PreRaphaelite, pre-Decadent, and pre-Wildean because of the marked floral taste, and the description of a ‘blessed damozel’ who is a-sexual but after all not untouched by the tremors of desire. The sensitive plant symbolizes opening – including a sexual sub-sense – to the light that bathes it, and the male wind that penetrates it. In the garden of Eden, where all is sweetness, harmony and ecstasy, the interpenetration and intermingling of the other plants and flowers contrast with the solitude of the sensitive plant, which loves intensely but is not loved back, though it overflows with love. The sublime gardener, another solitary figure, has, for company, only a bright 32 33

Cf. gloss in Bloom 1959, 75. A comparison between the two poets might start with the ‘sentence’ handed down to both poets at more or less the same age, that the tuberculosis with which they had been (wrongly) diagnosed gave them a life expectancy of not more than a few days. Both died later, for entirely different causes. From a poetic point of view, one might apply to Shelley the same definition Dylan Thomas gave of his own poetry: that is was born from, and developed from a ‘host of images’. The ‘Ode to the West Wind’, together with others by Shelley, already exhibits a tight parallel structure based on the repetition of the same stanzaic and syntactic pattern until the end, a device used by Thomas in almost all the poems in his first collection of 1934.

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Spirit, with no trace of erotic love; in this, it is a human version of the sensitive plant. There is an element of utopia in the removal of all that is rotten in the animal and vegetable world to be dispersed in distant woods. The gardener dies suddenly at the end of summer, so that the poem is also a parable of the seasons: with the arrival of winter, the garden is abandoned to the weeds. The short ‘conclusion’ is typical of Shelley: forever concerned with explaining his poems, he here intimates that death is a fiction or a trick; or, rather, only man, not nature, declines completely, never to be renewed. 4. ‘The Cloud’, too, depicts change and tumult in the sky, with the cloud that dissolves and performs its own funeral rites, then destroys its own ‘cenotaph’, re-creates and re-shapes itself. ‘To the Skylark’ declares the superiority of the lark’s song to all other forms of music, and wonders at the bird’s Keatsian immunity to pain and suffering and its capacity for such complete, intoxicating joy. Epipsychidion,34 written in early 1821, is the most perfect expression of Shelley’s Platonism, which was, after all, eroticized, as we have seen in ‘The Sensitive Plant’; at the same time, Shelley once again presents himself as a Promethean liberator of a figure behind bars (‘bound’, in a Shelleyan sense). The figure was Teresa Viviani, re-christened Emilia; Shelley wishes to flee with her (the reality was more prosaic: Shelley and his wife had fallen out over the rumour that he had fathered a child on a Neapolitan woman). ‘Platonic’ is the search, in the real world, for the reincarnation of the perceived idea of the second, or complementary, soul of the poet; she is then invited to a happy island in the Aegean, with an emphasis on the unifying urge of pre-lapsarian nature. Critics have neglected to comment on the avant-texte, which includes, once again, a strange, or recently unused, instance of self-mythologizing. Shelley reflects himself in a poet who died in Florence, and who had bought one of the Sporades islands and built and refurbished there an old building. There he hoped to realize his dream of a happier world, ‘so difficult to bring about in the real world’, and which he inhabits now he is dead. Preface and poem are the work of a 34 The title means more or less ‘a work that deals with the soul issuing from a soul’. On the basis of this poem, Shelley was, and is still, judged a narcissist who could only see his beloved as the ‘duplicate of his own, adored image’ (Praz, in SSI, vol. I, 224, in an insightful feature on Allegra and Teresa-Emilia Viviani).

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poet who relives in tranquillity the now-extinguished flame of passion for the Pisan countess, another icon, after Harriet, of paternal tyranny, and a woman towards whom Shelley was always ‘sensitive’. ‘Adonais’ is the name given to Keats in the elegy of the same name, a fusion of the Greek god, ‘Adonis’, with the Hebrew word for God, ‘Adonai’. In reality, the statement repeated from the beginning of the poem is overturned: the dead become the survivors and the mourned dead person lives again, drinking spiritually of the fountain of eternity and thus becoming one with nature, while the living inhabit a dream. The argument is the same as is found in practically all elegies: the dead are not really dead, but, freed from the heavy, cumbersome chains of mortal life, have entered the kingdom of immortality. Shelley’s very last poems vary from the apparently trivial, though pleasing compositions, some fictitiously ‘improvised’ (such as the one on the ‘Aziola’, and another on ‘the boat on the Serchio’) to scenes of nature pure and simple, like those on the evening, or night, down to the final, opulent ‘lyrical drama’ on the Greek war of independence (Hellas). The final Platonic ‘form’ to be sung by Shelley was Jane Williams, to whom he dedicated four poems evocative of states of unfortunately ephemeral ecstasy, a prefiguration of that ‘good moment’ also dear to Browning and Lawrence and, in a way, to Joyce, too. They might even be seen as a cycle, to match Wordsworth’s ‘Lucy poems’. In them the poet ponders on the destructiveness and the fragile, illusory nature of love and happiness; they exude the pessimism and the same vision of life that inform Shelley’s last work. § 193. Shelley V: ‘The Triumph of Life’. A critical and phantasmagoric diagnosis of the Enlightenment The unfinished poem in terza rima, The Triumph of Life, on which Shelley was working a few days before the shipwreck that took his life, has always mystified and bemused the critics, and is, after or on a par with Prometheus Unbound, the poem by Shelley that has been most subjected to interpretation of various kinds. Outside the Shelleyan canon, it is full of the kind of enigmas that make it comparable with the three principal poems by Coleridge, and Keats’s odes. Even those critics that are radically sceptical as to Shelley’s merits as a poet have warmed to it; such is the case of T. S. Eliot, who was to use the same Dantesque prosody and allegory himself.

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In his last of Four Quartets he uses terza rima, and employs the model of a dream vision, and the meeting with a mysterious ghostly guide who helps him to a form a prophetic diagnosis on life after the Blitz in the Second World War, which represented a crisis of values of an entire civilization, analogous to that envisioned by Shelley.35 In The Triumph of Life the triplets lend Shelley’s verse an extraordinary terseness, and help him to curb his propensity to exceed in figurative language. The particular fascination of this poem derives from its resounding title and the fact that it proceeds for more than 500 lines only to stop short on a question that is far from banal: the otherworldly pilgrim asks of his guide: ‘Then, what is Life?’ So, it is not so much the use of terza rima that constitutes the difference with respect to the rest of Shelley’s works: rather, it is this first virtual apparition of a nondescriptive poem on the workings of perception in the field of nature; and of non-lyrical poetry on the agonizing fleetingness of love and the yearning for ‘Panic’ fusion with the All. It is, in fact, Shelley’s only ‘symbolic allegory’: the allegory is wide, articulated and continuative, though suspended just as it reaches the culminating point, the point at which the Shelleyan ‘veil’ is about to be lifted.36 Two important, relatively unused images now come to Shelley’s aid (in other works, his figurative language becomes gradually more stereotyped): the ‘triumphal chariot’ and the wild, convulsive dance.37 To be more precise, The Triumph of Life is a diagnostic allegory, an attempt to sum up the history of centuries, captured in quick, lightning flashes; it is the same history that is presented in more disciplined, orderly form, in the Defence of Poetry – like Dante himself when he lashes out at his enemies in his Commedia. The numerous periphrases or antonomasias that mask the identity of the human referents are also reminiscent of Dante. It is further proof, and the last in time, of Shelley’s continuous, varied dialogism: the 35

Cf. Volume 7, § 101.7, for a reading of ‘Little Gidding’ II, and, in particular, for the fact that the poetic ‘I’ draws from the meeting with the mysterious figure an opportunity to meditate on his own life. 36 Since Shelley always postpones revealing the Absolute, one might conclude, with Pagnini, art. cit., 285, that he deliberately ended the poem with this question. 37 Used, in Eliot’s Quartets, as an image of musical harmony, and as a symbol of ancient peasant communities (Volume 7, § 101.3).

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Petrarchan allusion is almost purely an accessory – ‘triumph’ in the heraldic sense of a procession – but the chariot driven by a Janus-like charioteer is a modified reminiscence of Purgatorio XXXII, merged with Ezekiel’s chariot and wheel. I have hinted above at the possibility, confirmed by Mary Shelley, that Shelley had no great familiarity with medieval poetry, but it is hard not to hear, in the first flash of the poem, the famous incipit of Langland’s great poem. In this imitation of a ‘canto’, especially a Dantesque one, the pilgrim’s guide ironically becomes one of the damned, or of the inmates of Purgatory, or self-confessed sinners. The guide in question is Rousseau, who makes at one and the same time a self-criticism and palinode, along with an impugnment of the very Illuminism he co-founded. The otherworldly pilgrim sees the damned appear before him, and what surprising figures they are! The Virgilian guide is not, however, super partes, but one of the defeated of life, who tells his story in a flashback. This is the crucial turning point of a poem by one like Shelley, who never tires of preaching that everything propends towards renewal. Those of its readers and critics who are optimists interpret the interruption of the poem as coinciding with the moment when, after the thesis or antithesis, a synthesis or antithesis is in sight, in other words, a possible way out towards rebirth and hope: in Dantesque terms, the progression from one ‘cantica’ to another – from Hell to Purgatory and then to Paradise. This interpretation, however, is far from being sure. 2. As in the Anglo-French medieval tradition, the poem tells of a ‘waking dream’ one summer morning; the primary elements of the dream vision are the pulvis on the road, which, as in Metaphysical poetry, symbolizes the end of life, and the ‘madding crowd’ that follows the chariot, as giddy and mindless as midges, a preparatory metaphor for passive obedience. The charioteer is a two-faced Janus (here, with four faces), because in the other world, as in Dante, human beings present different faces compared with the face or the ‘fame’ (often false) they had in life. On the chariot sits the horrid, decrepit figure of Life or Life in Death. Rousseau, as in a painting by Arcimboldo, appears as an old root, with holes instead of eyes, and is forced to admit that it is indeed him, and no one else, in this infernal pit. Many others, considered virtuous in life, are yoked to the chariot: some are identified by periphrases, others, not many, by their real

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names, like Frederick of Prussia, and even Kant. The heart of the vision is a rhapsody or autobiographical fantasia of Rousseau, which begins with a quasi-Wordsworthian acceptance of the gradual disappearance, after infancy, of the visions of heavenly light, and goes on to become an empty cognitive parable. Shelley transforms – in fact, overturns romantically –38 the Dantesque reminiscence or figure of Matelda into a Form made of pure light which gives Rousseau a draught of nepenthe so that he loses his fancy, or, rather, makes him bitterly aware of his predicament. After this very long flashback, we are back where we started, with the noisy, riotous crowd following the chariot. Rousseau’s search for the ideal has failed, and he himself confesses he is incapable of leading man towards a transcendent reality, though he has tried. The discouraged but complicit mankind that mindlessly follows the chariot is Shelley’s parting symbol of the slavery against which he has always fought. § 194. Shelley VI: ‘A Defence of Poetry’ Leaving far below it the numerous theoretical pamphlets and introductions, A Defence of Poetry is a towering statement of the real ars poetica that accompanies and sustains, a priori and a posteriori, Shelley’s entire poetic production. At the same time, together with Wordsworth’s Prefaces and Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, it is a synthesis of Romantic aesthetics, a fundamental link between the past and the future, and, as such, an obligatory reference point for aesthetics yet to come. It was written in ever-expanding concentric circles (that is, in several drafts) in 1820, but published only in 1840. It was intended to be a response to Peacock’s The Four Ages of Poetry, but became a receptacle for ideas and convictions already present and functioning in Shelley’s mind, so that it is, in fact, an independent and absolute poetic manifesto. This can be seen in the dense network of verbal and conceptual references to great critical treatises of the past, beginning with the title and its patent allusion to Sidney, and in the overt and continuous dialogue between the lines with contemporary 38

That is, it inverts the Romantic, destructive feminine phantasm that Shelley had favoured until then, largely owing to his recent unfortunate love entanglements (PLE, 281–2).

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theoreticians, not only Peacock. The repercussions of this quintessence of Romantic aesthetics was ironically to be seen in the contestation of the Victorians, who had access to it at the beginning of the period named after them, because Shelley’s tenet of the fatally fleeting nature of inspiration clashed with the nascent aesthetic of the novel, Trollope’s in particular, according to which the literary work had to be rationally concocted by the writer at his desk. On the other hand, George Eliot is one of the very few writers who returned to the Romantic aesthetic in her considerations on literature and the nature of inspiration.39 But Shelley the aesthetologist was really re-discovered by the Decadents and modernists: Joyce reformulated the theory of inspiration as Shelley’s ‘fading coal’.40 T. S. Eliot then proceeded to use several of Shelley’s metaphors to construct a controversial counter-theory. Auden responded to Shelley’s optimistic, dashing finale – ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’ – by saying that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’. In three movements, Shelley in the Defence begins by discussing the statutory and heuristic differences between reason and imagination, then goes on to show how the arts evolved, underlining, in true Romantic fashion, the importance of poetry in the early stages of human development. He gives a panoramic vision of world poetry, including, of course, that written in English. He ends with a hymn to poetry and its beneficial functions. Equally Romantic is the fideistic axiom that, in history, tout se tient: there are no watertight divisions between the various branches of culture. 2. Not fancy and imagination, as in Coleridge, but reason and imagination are Shelley’s starting points: reason attends to the differences between perceived objects, while imagination sees and synthesizes relationships and similarities. The reworking of Coleridge’s position is most effective in the evocation of the Aeolian harp, which represents the imagination touched by sense impressions, and which, in this pure form, was the first kind of poetry produced by man at the dawn of civilization, when the primitive poet communicated to his listeners the reality absorbed by his mind in the form of images, metaphors, and, in general, signs. Since that time, the 39 Volume 5, § 196.2. 40 Volume 7, § 131.2.

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poet has been interrogating the present for signs of the future. Shelley puts forward a restrictive idea of poetry, which he retracts almost immediately. Only poetry, he says, is a direct expression of thought, while the other arts employ extraneous material (but what about music?). Therefore, poetry is untranslatable, because its linguistic, prosodic and harmonic features are part of its very being. However, he then says that it is a serious mistake to divide poetry from prose, and lists examples of poet-prose-writers, starting with Plato, whose philosophic writings exemplify a similar search for harmony, expressiveness and linguistic creativity. For Shelley, the poet is always someone who transforms chaos into harmony (or ‘cosmos’). A whole tradition of English prose, usually neglected, is revalued as poetry on the basis of certain features, like, for example, rhythm in Bacon. The opposite is also true, however, and the great, ‘metrical’ poets are also purveyors of truth, and, therefore, philosophers. So Shelley proposes a rather loose definition of poetry, with, as its least common denominator, the image, or even the single, isolated flash, in a neutral stylistic context; in these terms, Herodotus or Livy can be thought of as poets.41 The premise is based on the antithesis, ever-present in Shelley, between ‘inert’ and ‘living’ – and images must be ‘living’. The only aim of poetry is the Horatian utile dulci miscere, but Shelley defers his explanation of what he means by ‘useful’ and proceeds to illustrate, in gripping pictures, the history of poetry itself, at first intuitive and unconscious, a kind of spell cast on listeners who are stimulated to imitate the feats of heroes (Homer). The empathetic expression of beauty is different – here, he echoes Keats – to explicitly didactic verse. In line with his synthetic, monistic concept of poetry, Shelley extols Ancient Greece as an example of a Wagnerian, Wort-Ton-Drama kind of art, rather than self-contained, separate activity. He thought of King Lear and Calderón as examples of total spectacle, a dramatic rite that included music and dance. Drama is an indicator of the moral standard of a nation; a healthy theatre implies a healthy community, as long as the drama in question is not purely imitative, but original and throbbing with life itself. The 41

Aesthetic scholars like René Wellek attacked Shelley for being ‘anachronistic’, blaming him for the subsequent disrepute of Romantic aesthetics, though salvaging his cybernetic intuition that poetry de-familiarizes the familiar.

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contamination of the virile vein of the great Greek poets by the Sicilian and Alexandrine pastoralists is described as the advent of a nauseating ‘odour of the tuberose’ after the ‘meadow-gale of June’, which echoes that ‘west wind’ celebrated in his recent ode, therefore according to another channel of communication and within the same frame of his art. As I mentioned, it is unlikely T. S. Eliot failed to notice this image, and, transforming it into the ‘smell of the rose’, used it against its inventor; later in the text, the ‘odour of the rose’ is the synthesis of the separate elements of the flower. Roman civilization is an eloquent example of a decline in manners – a ‘torpor’ – paralleled by a dissociation between the life of the community and artistic and literary activity. Slavery, the greatest blight on the modern world for Shelley, was not, however, produced by the message of Christ, which was distorted in the Middle Ages: on the contrary, the ‘good news’ of the Gospels was beneficial because it brought freedom from fetters, thanks also to Celtic influences. The utile, left suspended earlier in the essay, is incommensurable with respect to the ‘usefulness’ of utilitarianism in whose name Peacock argued the necessary decline of poetry. While one kind of philosophy, the most recent exponent of which was Bentham, left the evils of society as they were, unchanged, great progress had been achieved by the French and English philosophes, who had supported and encouraged the victorious crusade against intolerance and slavery in all its forms. The long, symphonic finale emphasizes, above all, the ‘de-familiarizing’ power of poetry, and its usefulness as mental exercise and a way to break the chains of habit-formation. And the poet? The critic of Wordsworth now echoes him, calling him an upright, responsible member of society, apart from one or two peccadillos that do not compromise the final verdict. § 195. Keats* I: The uncertain plenitude of myth Clearly, John Keats (1795–1822), unlike the other five main Romantic poets of England, cannot be fitted into any of those stimulating, dialectical groups or pairs, sometimes, but not always, marked by tempestuous affinity, 1

*

Equally reliable annotated editions are: Poems, ed. M. Allott, London 1970, Complete Poems, ed. J. Barnard, Harmondsworth 1973, and Poems, ed. J. Stillinger, Cambridge, MA 1978. Letters, ed. H. E. Rollins, 2 vols, Cambridge, MA 1958.

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Life. R. M. Milnes, Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats, London 1848; S. Colvin, John Keats, His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-Fame, London 1917; A. Lowell, John Keats, 2 vols, New York and Boston, MA 1925; W. J. Bate, John Keats, Cambridge, MA 1963, and, rev., New York 1966, Cambridge, MA 1979, London 1979; A. Ward, John Keats: The Making of a Poet, New York 1963 and, rev., 1986; R. Gittings, John Keats, London 1968 (revised and amplified version of a volume published in 1954); A. Motion, Keats, London 1997; S. Plumly, Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography, New York 2009; R. S. White, John Keats: A Literary Life, Basingstoke 2010; N. Roe, John Keats: A New Life, New Haven, CT and London 2012. Criticism. J. M. Murry, Keats and Shakespeare: A Study of Keats’s Poetic Life from 1816 to 1820, London 1925, Westport, CT 1978, and Studies in Keats, London 1930, 1955; C. D. Thorpe, The Mind of John Keats, New York 1926; H. R. Ridley, Keats’s Craftsmanship: A Study in Poetic Development, Oxford 1933; C. L. Finney, The Evolution of Keats’s Poetry, 2 vols, Cambridge, MA 1936, 1963; W. J. Bate, Negative Capability: The Intuitive Approach in Keats, Cambridge, MA 1939, and The Stylistic Development of Keats, London 1945, and, as editor, Keats: A Collection of Critical Essays, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1964; J. R. Caldwell, Keats’ Fancy, Ithaca, NY 1945; G. H. Ford, Keats and the Victorians: A Study of His Influence and Rise to Fame, 1821– 1895, New Haven, CT 1945; N. F. Ford, The Prefigurative Imagination of John Keats, Stanford, CA 1951; E. R. Wasserman, The Finer Tone: Keats’ Major Poems, Baltimore, MD 1953, 1967; E. C. Pettet, On the Poetry of Keats, Cambridge 1957; John Keats: A Reassessment, ed. E. Muir, Liverpool 1958; D. Perkins, The Quest for Permanence: The Symbolism of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, Cambridge, MA 1959; J. Bayley, Keats and Reality, London 1962; W. Evert, Aesthetic and Myth in the Poetry of Keats, Princeton, NJ 1965; D. Bush, John Keats: His Life and Writings, New York 1966; M. Pagnini, ‘Canovaccio per uno studio strutturale dell’Ode to a Nightingale di J. Keats’, in Struttura letteraria e metodo critico, Messina-Firenze 1966, 179–223 (ground breaking essay of textual and contextual interpretation, discussed by Praz in SSI, vol. II, 194–7); I. Jack, Keats and the Mirror of Art, Oxford 1967 (indispensable for the study of the relation between Keats and the visual arts); R. Mayhead, John Keats, Cambridge 1967 (an essential discussion of Keatsian ‘tensions’); Twentieth Century Interpretations of Keats’s Odes, ed. J. Stillinger, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1968, also author of The Hoodwinking of Madeline and Other Essays on Keats’s Poems, Urbana, IL 1971, The Text of Keats’s Poems, Cambridge, MA 1975, and Reading ‘The Eve of St Agnes’: The Multiples of Complex Literary Transaction, New York 1999; J. Jones, John Keats’s Dream of Truth, London 1969; C. Patterson, Jr, The Daemonic in the Poetry of John Keats, Urbana, IL 1970; M. Dickstein, Keats and His Poetry: A Study in Development, Chicago, IL 1971; John Keats: The Odes: A Casebook, ed. G. S. Fraser, London 1971; CRHE, ed. G. M. Matthews, London 1971; S. Sperry, Keats

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with souls that, while not exactly kindred, are congenial; unless one counts the, in a way, one-sided relationship between Keats and the older – but, as a poet, poorer – Leigh Hunt. In one way only and because of a number of external circumstances (neither went to university, and neither were of noble origin), Keats may be likened to Blake, that other solitary, ‘mateless’ Romantic. Keats, who never mentions Blake, and never met him,1 echoes him and resembles him in the mighty, Michaelangiolesque forms of the two Hyperions, which, however, in other ways, are quite different, because, while there is no doubt that Keats is a dreamer, he is less of a one than Blake, the messianic manipulator of myths according to his own personal, esoteric system of symbols. Keats, in fact, was careful to differentiate himself from Byron – Byron described what he saw, while he, Keats described what he imagined; from Wordsworth, the writer of ‘school essays’; and from Coleridge. In collective memory, Keats is usually associated with Shelley. This mnemonic link rests on a number of objective facts: they were almost the same age; both were ‘meteoric’ – Shelley’s career lasted ten years, more or less, while Keats was given only three years of productive writing; both the Poet, Princeton, NJ 1973; C. Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment, Oxford 1974; M. Allott, John Keats, Harlow 1976; R. M. Ryan, Keats: The Religious Sense, Princeton, NJ 1976; L. Conti Camaiora, Il primo Keats: lettura della poesia 1814–1818, Lecce 1978; W. Walsh, Introduction to Keats, London 1981; John Keats: The Narrative Poems: A Casebook, ed. J. S. Hill, London 1983; H. Vendler, The Odes of John Keats, Cambridge, MA 1983; D. Pollard, The Poetry of Keats, Brighton 1984; John Keats, ed. H. Bloom, New York 1985; M. Aske, Keats and Hellenism, Cambridge, MA 1987; J. Barnard, John Keats, Cambridge 1987; M. Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory, Oxford 1988; G. Galigani, Il labirinto della mente. Le odi di John Keats, Ravenna 1989; Critical Essays on John Keats, ed. H. de Almeida, Boston, MA 1990; B. Stone, The Poetry of Keats, Harmondsworth 1992; G. F. Scott, The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis and the Visual Arts, Hanover, NH 1995; K. D. White, John Keats and the Loss of Romantic Innocence, Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA 1996; N. Roe, John Keats and the Culture of Dissent, New York 1997; The Cambridge Companion to Keats, ed. S. J. Wolfson, Cambridge 2001, also author of Reading John Keats, Cambridge 2016; J. C. Whale, John Keats, Basingstoke 2004; J. Siler, Poetic Language and Political Engagement in the Poetry of Keats, London 2008; S. K. Bari, Keats and Philosophy, London 2012. 1

White 1996, xi.

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died in poignant, tragic circumstances, in Italy, first Keats, then, a few months later, Shelley. The poetry of both deals with the function of poetry itself and the meaning of life; and they have in common the theme of the evanescence of beauty. Keats, in particular, seeks union with the icons of beauty itself, and finds in art the way out of transience and towards the eternal. A closer look, however, will show that Shelley is merely the least different to Keats in the context of Romanticism. The two poets met at Leigh Hunt’s house in 1816; neither was much taken with the other.2 After that, they never met again, though they read each other’s works. Shelley gradually came to appreciate Keats as a poet, but Keats was more crabbed and critical about Shelley: he wrote him several letters, in one of which he said that he, Shelley, was too ‘magnanimous’, and exhorted him to ‘load every rift of [his] subject with ore’, an appraisal I will return to shortly. Keats, forever suspicious, turned down Shelley’s disinterested invitation to join him in Tuscany in 1821, while Shelley, ever ‘magnanimous’, wrote one of the great English elegies, Adonais, to mourn the death of his fellow poet, who had died in Piazza di Spagna, in Rome, where he had gone to find a kindlier climate for his consumption-ridden body. The prophecy of a short life and imminent death was true in the case of Keats (the last of the great Romantics to be born – in the same year as Carlyle – and the first to die), but not for Shelley. In his letter, mentioned above, Keats had put his finger on the difference between their poetics: Keats is a pure poet (his words in the letter imply that Shelley left some dross in his verses); Shelley, on the other hand, thinks of poetry, at least in part, and at certain moments of his career, as a ‘tool’ or ‘instrument’. In other words, Keats represents a more complete immersion in poetry: he lived for poetry and for nothing else. Starting with ‘Sleep and Poetry’ he wrote poetry about poetry, praising it as a purveyor of knowledge and happiness, or at least as a therapy for the pain and suffering of life. He had no messianic dreams to propose, only the gospel of beauty; religious and political convictions, ethical responsibilities, ideals – all take second place.3 His only faith was the 2 3

They used the same publisher, Ollier, at least for Keats’s 1817 poems. Recent scholarly research (like Roe 1997) has brought to light, and accentuated, links between the young Keats and a number of pedagogues (Dissenters, like the

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faith in his poetic imagination; his philosophical scepticism – one might say even nihilism – was expressed in the famous definition, ‘negative capability’. He could never have been a reformer, agitator or inciter to rebellion. He became the pure poet that he was as a brilliant amateur, an outsider, and self-taught to boot. From the moment he decided to be a poet – as he says in his sonnet, ‘On first looking into Chapman’s Homer’ – he began a breathless race against time that led him to write and publish at one and the same time. His was the fastest poetic ripening in the whole history of poetry. 2. Like the Middle English poets, Keats used ‘matters’ on which to project and weave his vision of life and art: he chose both the Greek and the Arthurian ‘matter’ as reference structures and parallel universes to represent his spiritual world and all the degrees of his Sehnsucht. His contemporaries, too, idealized the Middle Ages; this collective enthusiasm was to bear fruit later in the form of the Victorian medievalists, of whom Hopkins is one. Now, it is true that Keats looked back with nostalgia to the age of chivalry, but the civilization he would have felt most at home in – like Pater after him – was that of Ancient Greece, where the presence of the pagan gods was still palpable, and men lived in a world that was harmonious, a-temporal, and full of all they could desire. The sonnet dedicated to Leigh Hunt is clear about this: the world is empty and the land ‘waste’ because the gods have left. Men no longer breathe the smell of incense burned to honour the pagan deities. Only gleams of grandeur survive here and there. This is why other sonnets and poems state the opposite, depending on mood and point of view; one begins, ‘Great spirits now on earth are Unitarian Reverend Fox, who, shortly after, in the 1830s, was to ‘discover’ Browning). The theory is that Keats derived from them a kind of libertarianism that puts in a timid appearance now and then in his works, but with no great results. Critics have always wondered what direction Keats’s poetry would have taken if he had not died so young; the usual answer has been that he would have become a great philosophical poet, or that his solipsism would have been transformed into a concern for social issues. Obviously there are no solid grounds for either of these hypotheses. Keats, unlike Shelley, always insisted that he did not address a wide audience, and that his poetry was not aimed at immediate popularity and financial gain (letter dated 9 April, 1818).

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sojourning’; another echoes, ‘The poetry of earth is never dead’. That is how it was, and Keats felt within himself that this was true; at other times he realized that he was presumptuous, and called himself ‘a blank idiot’, addressing Apollo in his ‘Hymn’; Apollo is angry because he has presumed to wear the laurel wreath, he, ‘a worm – too low crawling for death’. Keats immerses himself empathetically in Greek mythology to satisfy his desire for fullness to counter his biographical and historical ‘blankness’. As I shall demonstrate, the conceptual, metaphorical opposition between ‘empty and ‘full’ runs through all of Keats’s poetry,4 as is proved by a statistical count of the occurrences of the verb ‘to fill’ in its various forms and meanings. It follows that, while in the case of Shelley, the only inspiration he received from the sister arts was from the Uffizi ‘Medusa’, Keats is one of the most ekphrastic, or art-referential poets in the whole of literature: he scrutinizes and interrogates Greek sculpture, is fascinated by the marble frieze of the Parthenon, the great painters of the Renaissance and ItalianFrench-Flemish Baroque – obviously, on mythological subjects – seen in various exhibitions in London, or in etchings,5 as well as by the work of contemporary painters like Haydon and Severn.6 Keats’s rapturous nostalgia for the ‘fullness’ of the world of Greek mythology has been certified and accepted unanimously by critics; however, they have also gradually realized that the sharpness of the dividing line fades somewhat, with the ‘full’ becoming ‘empty’ and the ‘empty’ ‘full’. Keats confesses his abandonment to voluptuous sensations that make him forget the world, but no sooner has he admitted it than he regrets it, and feels guilty that his poetry is devoid of ‘matter’ that concerns social and political values or the public good. From 4

5 6

The early sonnet dedicated to the afore-mentioned Hunt (‘To Leigh Hunt, Esq.’) is constructed according to a pattern that will be repeated in other works: the present is empty, setting off a stream of anaphoras like ‘this thing is not what it was before’, and so on. In the whole octave the underlying rhetorical figure is preterition. Then, in the void, a fullness is seen – the figure of the poet who is being celebrated. A little clumsily, with something of a faux pas, Hunt is presented as a new Pan, a benign deity honoured by an all too meagre sacrifice. A close examination of pictorial references is found in Jack 1967. Keats probably saw some of his own tensions in Mozart, thus showing that his poetry is not limited to stimuli from painting alone.

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a linguistic and stylistic point of view, Keats’s favourite rhetorical figure is the paradox, or oxymoron, such as ‘aching pleasure’. As a rule, similar contradictions, when found in juvenilia, are seen, not as real aporias, but as signs of literary immaturity and intellectual hesitation. Keats wrote in order to work out what he needed to think about. Quite different is the case of the short poems, the last ones, and, above all, the great odes, which do not form an achronic, changeable counterpoint of moods, but must be placed against a background in which all attempts to find meaning and pleasure in human life disappear. My micro-structural reading will show that it is, in fact, necessary to overturn the manifest meanings of the odes, and that the energizing symbols of beauty and immortality that Keats, like Leopardi, ‘feigns’ – such as the ‘cold pastoral’ of the Grecian urn, and the nightingale that, at the end of his song, flies off unseen towards other woods – are cracked, put to one side, and, finally, discarded. Critical deconstruction, long before it officially appeared, repeatedly observed that there is, in Keats, no compensation for the illusive nature of dreams, that imagination itself is only a ‘deadly embrace’, and that there is therefore no way out of the impasse.7 This approach has replaced that of the first Keats scholars, so that now the tendency is to seek and find indications of nihilism even in the two poems in which he seems to sing so loudly of the victory of positive forces over negative ones, of the triumph of love and vital heat over the gelid nothingness of death, and the body and its senses against ice-cold reason: I am referring to ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ and ‘To Autumn’. This critical revision was set in motion by the fact that a Keats that sings unreservedly of fullness instead of, always, emptiness that returns victorious, is suspicious. 3. Whoever thinks of Keats as being always sad is surprised when reading his letters, which, far from being gloomy, desperate or resigned, are often full of humour and wit (sometimes, if truth be told, a little forced).8 Declarations on the transitory nature of beauty and the unfailing 7 8

S. Sabbadini, in MAR, vol. III, 457. Keats’s letters were published for the first time in an incomplete edition in 1848; since then it has become a cult text, revered not so much as an instrument, but as an independent aesthetic and personal document. In the huge variety of philosophical

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return of sad thoughts are found everywhere; but a sunset, or a sparrow at his window are enough to recreate the magic of exorcism. The letters are often acrobatic, virtuoso exercises in style, like a coverlet of quotations adapted to the circumstances, almost pushing to one side the actual reason for writing the letter in the first place. They are read and re-read, not for their practical function, but as exercises in pure art. Keats is often like a Prospero, a marquetry master inlaying in his text quotations from and allusions to Shakespeare; in other words, he lives with one foot, or sometimes both feet in a magic dimension, where life becomes theatre and all the world is a Shakespearean ‘stage’. In the places of his wanderings, the learned remark is always at hand to suggest some story, and Keats is at the centre of it. So he discovers that great books, like Shakespeare’s plays, never cease to produce what today we would call their ‘entropy’, even if we read ‘the same play forty times’ (17.4.1817). Keats’s poetic aesthetics naturally follows no treatise-like formulation, but is scattered here and there in extemporary pronouncements. Their very ‘naturalness’ signifies an absence of rhetorical pressure on the reader: the poetic spirit is diffused ‘in a fine excess’ – where ‘fine’ means ambiguously moderate, thin – and, instead of stopping other people’s breath, dispenses intimate delight. The letter on the ‘discretion’ of poetry together with its apparent lack of a message, is dated 3 February 1818 (‘we hate poetry that has a palpable design on us […] it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance’). Keats’s poetry, indeed, tends towards the suppression of the poetic ‘I’, and yearns to become a passive instrument, like Coleridge’s Aeolian harp. In an age of Titans and egotistical poets, Keats takes a stand against the elephantiasis of the ‘I’ and Wordsworth’s ‘egotistical sublime’. Like Shelley, he states that history has seen at least two disinterested figures, Socrates and Christ. Only love has an exorcizing power equal to that of art, and the power of love equals that of beauty and is identical to it. Like Hopkins (who echoes him), he claims that genius is totally independent, and remonstrates against imitation:

reflections, mixed with often agonizing stories drawn from everyday life, they remind the Italian reader of Leopardi’s Zibaldone and letters.

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‘The Genius of Poetry […] cannot be matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness in itself ’. The poet is the least poetical of creatures while being the most poetical in another, different sense: that is, in himself he is empty, and only places himself at the disposal of other beings, into whom he enters, and whom he fills. At the end of this letter of 27 October 1818, Keats hypothesizes his metempsychosis and his entrance into another person’s soul. If the poet must fill with ore his poetry (and Keats his own, as is often repeated – indeed, load it to the full), then the task of the reader is to unload and empty it (19 February 1818). But great poetry is never emptied, and continues to spread its infinite treasures day after day, year after year. Keats’s letters seem at times to be a natural companion to the poetry, and Keats the letter-writer the first critic of his poetry. Of course, as with all critics, he must be taken cum grano salis – as is by now usual, the difference is increased owing to a prejudicial idea of the contradictions between a poet that writes and one who interprets what he writes, ex post, or even before. Keats felt he was not a strong thinker, and a thinker he wished to be, although he theorized about ‘negative capability’, and had no metaphysical beliefs or certainties, was ideologically apathetic, and, if anything, subscribed to a vague ‘religion of humanity’. His letters, too, like Shelley’s prefaces, are used currently to corroborate a given interpretation of the poems or to highlight possible aporias. The objection critics always meet with is that one cannot use opportunistically the same texts for quite different ends, that is, to expound and then deny the contents of a poem according to one’s own convenience. 4. Keats’s rate of production was an oscillation between ‘full’ and ‘empty’. He first published in Hunt’s Examiner in 1816, and reached the peak of his poetic activity in 1818–1819 (especially in the spring and summer of 1819); in the last fourteen months of his life, consumption condemned him to inactivity, producing an empty space in his career. However, for one who died at twenty-five, Keats wrote a considerable, if not huge, number of works. Three editions of his poems came out during his lifetime: Poems, in 1817 (Keats was twenty-two) contained thirty-three poems; Endymion followed in 1818; Lamia with other poems, and practically all the odes, and all the other poems of the principal Keatsian canon, save one, was

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published in 1820. Out of a total of about 200 compositions, a certain number stand out as some of the greatest poems in the language: three medium-length works, and about a dozen ‘great odes’, intensely lyrical, conceptually complex and insidious, which, now part of the English heritage, have constituted one of the testing grounds of criticism for the past century. The criticism in question had been in a state of agitation ever since Byron, without thinking, called Keats a ‘girl’, and ‘mawkish’ became synonymous with ‘Keatsian’. So, his reception by his contemporaries was far from flattering – if Shelley is to be believed, it brought on depression, which hastened his death. But in the course of the nineteenth century he became the most loved of all the Romantics, and the origin of the myth of unallayable Sehnsucht. He was one of the great, if not greatest, shaping forces of early Victorian poetry, from Tennyson’s ‘The Lotos Eaters’ and Arnold’s ‘The New Sirens’ and ‘The Strayed Reveller’, to the PreRaphaelitism of Rossetti and his circle, the young Hopkins and his ‘Vision of the Mermaids’, Swinburne with his hymns and the odes on Proserpine, and Morris, who sang of the eternity of myth. ‘Feminine’, ‘androgynous’, ‘melancholy’, and, above all, ‘sensuous’ are the adjectives most often used to describe him and his ‘syndrome’, which has given rise in the course of time to huge psycho-biographical tomes of 400 to 500 pages that often say very little about the actual poetry. In the more recent past, this tendency has been compensated for by microscopic examinations of ‘periods’ or ‘sectors’ of his production, like the ‘early Keats’, a strange label, given the very short time – three years – he was writing, but useful in determining the caesura between the first poems and the later, medium-long works and the ‘great odes’. § 196. Keats II: ‘Endymion’ and other oneiric rhapsodies Keats came from a lower-middle-class family, his father being, not an ostler, but the manager of the stables belonging to his parents-in-law, or the steward of his father-in-law’s farm. None in that context stood out for poetic ability or indeed any interest at all in literature. His father became quite wealthy, but died after falling from a horse when Keats was eight years old; his mother was a scatter-brained woman who took no great care of her children. By a tragic coincidence, she was to die of consumption

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when Keats was fourteen, leaving him and his siblings orphans.9 Keats had a fine, open face and dreamy eyes that always seemed to be looking far away; he was stubborn, exuberant and fun-loving, but short of stature, which always bothered him. As a boy, he had the good fortune to be sent to a private grammar school in Enfield, and to be introduced to poetry by the headmaster’s son. However, his step-father apprenticed him to a doctor, and, after a year’s internship in a hospital, he was licensed as a surgeon. At the age of eighteen he abandoned the relatively secure medical profession for the total insecurity of poetry. While Shelley was familiar with science, electricity and chemistry, and sounds convincing and competent when he speaks of scientific phenomena, Keats, former apprentice surgeon,10 was to put his small experience to good use, self-diagnosing his consumption in the blood he spat out in February 1820. His fiancée, Fanny Brawne, though not keen on poetry, did love him, the poet, sincerely. Owing, however, to their relative poverty and Keats’s precarious health, they had agreed to postpone their marriage. Keats knew nothing of the kind of polygamy practised by Shelley, and the real woman in his love life has nothing in common with a fatal Cleopatra, or his poetry was an oneiric deformation of it.11 It is not, therefore, surprising that, since he died at the early age of twenty-five, he had not done the grand tour, or become an exile, in fact or in spirit, but had, instead, lived practically all his life in or near London, or at any rate, in England. His ‘para-classical’ exoticism was amateurish and derivative. He had no grounding in Greek, and took the elements for his mythological poetry from dictionaries like Lemprière’s and from visits to 9

Owing to an inexplicable sudden decision, which had a negative effect of the affective equilibrium of the children, Keats’s mother, like Gertrude in Hamlet, re-married almost at once, and sent her children to their grandmother to be looked after. However, Keats was able to dedicate himself whole-heartedly to poetry thanks to a small inheritance from this very mother. 10 He was a ‘surgeon’, not a ‘physician’, since the latter required a degree, while the former did not. 11 Praz (SSI, vol. I, 72) excludes the possibility that Fanny Brawne bore the slightest resemblance to profane Love as painted by Titian, on the basis of a miniature portrait of the beloved in question, who is portrayed with passion-quenching plaits, a ‘sheepish face’ and a white bonnet tied under her chin.

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the British Museum to see the sculptures from the Parthenon frieze which had just been placed there after the ‘theft’ by Lord Elgin. The miracle of his poetry is all the greater if one thinks of the mediocre intellects and often deleterious mentors that surrounded him and guided him. Suffice it to say that while Shelley had the support of Plato, and, more concretely, of Godwin, Keats had Leigh Hunt, or, at most, Hazlitt. Keats took his first steps under the guidance of this spiritual father, Hunt,12 a radical in politics and able mixer of poetic cocktails made up of bits of medieval romance, Chaucer and Spenser; he was also the founder the so-called ‘Cockney School’, which was routinely rubbished by Tory reviewers. For all that, it was thanks to the derided Hunt that Keats was introduced to masters like Chaucer, Boccaccio and other precursors of the Elizabethans from whom to draw inspiration for his own poems. 2. Almost a quarter of Keats’s entire oeuvre precedes the mythological poem Endymion, which, in turn constitutes another quarter of the canon. So, a good half, if not more, of his production is made up of juvenilia or adolescent poetry – the terms, as we have seen, are relative. The very first poems, written in 1816 and 1817, celebrate public events, like the end of the Napoleonic regime and the restoration of liberty in Europe; they dedicate small, conventional keepsakes to female figures; they are mostly easy sonnets on various subjects that show the influence of Hunt in certain morphological mannerisms, like the frequent use of adjectives ending in –y.13At the same time, imitation of Spenser becomes tangible in scenes involving medieval knights, like Calidore (who appears in the Faerie Queene), and, in a particular kind of post-Spenserian sensibility that has ever since been known as ‘Keatsian’. In a number of escapist poems, the poet leaves the city to immerse himself in nature, in which he is pictured wandering through dreamlike scenery, until harsh reality returns and destroys the vision. A few

12 13

Often jokingly referred to as ‘Libertas’, Hunt lived in a house in London known as the ‘Vale of Health’ (§ 228.2). Here Keats, not yet twenty, was introduced to various friends, among whom Hazlitt, Lamb and Shelley. Among these, one sonnet in which poetry is compared to the sound of a cricket or grasshopper; others are epigrammatic and post-Augustan, or Popian, like the one dedicated to his sister-in-law, Georgiana Wylie.

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‘conversation poems’ bear the imprint of Coleridge. Even when Keats leaves the sonnet and turns to the ode, or writes fewer sonnets, he proceeds by inserting variants that turn into stanzas which might be called ‘sonnet-like’. That is to say that at a certain moment Keats begins to walk on his own two feet, a visual poet and an auditory one, who hears the echoes of other poets, not in the form of an obtrusive din, but mixed together in ‘pleasing harmony’. He still declares himself inferior to the ‘old poets’, though one exceptionally jaunty sonnet exults at his becoming ‘a poet’, but one who copies or imitates others greater than him. Poetry breathes in him and he echoes the voice of his predecessors; he is a supplicant imploring to be admitted to the choir of the poetic elect and take his place in the Apollonian paradise. As often happens in mythological poetry, the terms of this investiture are borrowed from the language of the Christian liturgy. The use of poetry for the benefit of mankind is considered as an alternative, dreamt of but never actually put into practice. In reality, the poet is faced, not with concrete objectives, but with experiences from the world of voluptuous dreams; he does not aspire to a life of combat in the real world, or rather, he is split: he is aware of the reality that surrounds him urging him to share ‘human strife’, but he fears it will be too much for him. The need for a poetry about reforming the world springs from his awareness that the reality is ‘depleted’: the great poets are dead, freedom, though restored, is still under threat, and the old gods have left the world. The art of the great independent poets, not corrupted and not slaves, is, temporarily, for him as for Shelley, an instrument for renovating the world; in one of the sonnets to Haydon he protests against the ‘money-mongering pitiable brood’: ‘These, these will give the world another heart’. 3. ‘I stood tip-toe on a little hill’, one of the two principal long poems before Endymion, is a rhapsody – a dream, or vision, imagined on one of those glorious May mornings that are the stock-in-trade of the poetry that flourished in the shade of the Roman de la Rose.14 It begins with a long description of a wood bathed in diaphanous light, and proceeds with mythological scenes; at the end, we see what seems to be some kind of

14

Volume 1, § 11.

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miraculous healing, set in a more concrete environment of everyday life, albeit somewhat transfigured. The opening of the poem presents a number of mannerisms that are to become typical of Keats, such as imperceptible gradations in sounds, and finely nuanced silences, or literally impossible oxymora bringing together the concepts of the heat and the coolness of the sun. In a world of nature that feeds and calms, the solitary poet hopes that some damsel will appear and love him; he waits for the moon to rise over the wood. The same Wordsworthian and Shelleyan force that animates nature acts on the human mind and on the poetizing poet, so that the poetizing mind is a metaphor for natural beauty, and its movement is a waving and stirring of tree-tops and flowers, which is both uplifting and oblivion-inducing. The poet is filled with ecstasy like – probably, because another Keatsian mannerism or weakness is the use of long, never-ending periphrases – Ovid in his mythological fables, which, with Psyche and Pan – two recurring figures in Keats – tell of love enjoyed and love denied. Then comes a scene involving Narcissus, then one about Endymion, the devotee of Diana. The last thirty lines or so bring a hiatus, which, in Keats, becomes both a fading away and a clean, violent break. The mythological figures are replaced by unrelated visions of reinvigorated invalids, now convalescent.15 These veiled, suggestive scenes, almost just flashes, all but conjure up an analogy between poetry revived and Christ raising the dead or dying: hospital scenes, where an inexplicable miracle restores the sick and dying to the incredulous joy of their relatives; or an analogical paraphrase of the miracle of Pentecost when, from the tongues of fire, poetry issues forth. ‘Sleep and Poetry’, too, is constructed on Pindaric transitions and the use of rhetorical tactics like antonomasia, periphrasis and even riddles. Long-winded circumlocutions and endless digressions defer the arrival of the hymn to restoring sleep and the declaration that poetry has even more and better restorative powers than sleep. The poet longs to be adopted and welcomed, after wandering in flowery clearings and dewy grots, but then becomes, once again, as strong as a giant; he sprouts wings on his shoulders – like Icarus – and becomes an immortal god. However, 15

Barnard 1973, 550.

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this coveted poetic investiture must be happily and delightfully destructive, since the poet immolates himself and, with his sacrifice, is able to reach Apollo in paradise. The second part illustrates the decadence of poetry after the splendour of Greece and its recent revival at the hands of the other Romantic poets. Keats mourns the passing of an Apollonian poetry, a celebration of cosmic harmony, not an immersion in everyday life. The hidden comparison with Icarus, referring back to the ‘Dedalian wings’, is intoxicating, but he bows to reality and, more modestly, declares he will live for the day, writing less lofty, less ‘godly’ verse. The ironical poetic voice appears to accept the prospect of an attenuated, trammelled imagination. He found such a ‘everyday paradise’ at Hunt’s, where he could see, hanging on the walls, paintings representing the same mythological subjects described in his poem. The last fifty lines do, in fact, herald future ekphrastic poems on pictures in Hunt’s house. 4. Keats considered the long poem the consecration of a true poet, and he planned two: the second he left unfinished, as it did not satisfy him. The first, Endymion (1818), was to be a ‘test’, and its progress was described step by step in letters addressed to his friends. As he feared, because of his association with Hunt and the ‘Cockney School’, and, therefore, to political Radicalism, it was damned by reviews in the conservative journals. The poem represents the beginning of a quest, by the poet’s double, for an elusive, deified woman that Shelley, too, had pursued in Alastor. Endymion, however, is not the work of some exalted poet, possessed by an overwhelming imagination, to which he is only an obedient slave. No: he had to write to ‘fill’ (to resume the metaphor used above) 4,000 lines of poetry; such was the agreement with the publisher, and Keats went to work by planning very carefully what he would write. He is like an architect that draws a blueprint, and already, in the early stages of construction, knows that he will not like the finished product. In his letters, the genesis of the poem is illustrated with the metaphor of the ‘pin points’ (‘when I consider that so many of these Pin points go to form a Bodkin point […] and that it requires a thousand bodkins to make a Spear bright enough to throw any light to posterity – I see that nothing but continual uphill Journeying!’). He also speaks, in his letters, of a time scheme and a deadline. The events of the poem are spread out in the four corners of the earth, sea, air, then

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back to earth in as many books. The technique of estrangement is used, and in one passage Keats recalls explicitly how the moderns received the myth of Endymion carried on the wings of the wind from ancient times.16 Almost all the contemporary readers of the poem agreed that the conceptual structure leaves much to be desired. Bridges, who condemned the poetic licence and florid extremes of fantasy of Hopkins, could but pass a carefully considered negative verdict on the poem. Until recently, Endymion has been excluded from the major Keatsian canon because of the lingering acerbity in its verse; but now there are loud calls for it to be promoted.17 At the same time the debate continues as to whether Endymion is to be considered a Platonic allegory about the search for beauty and the elevation of the poet to the essence,18 or just a plain story with no pretence to philosophy. Its main defect is the nebulousness that accompanies the transition from one scene to the next, some of them pertinent, others less so, so that when a fairly long mythological episode, like that of Glaucus, is inserted, although it has nothing to do with the main story, yet, paradoxically, it appears to give some vestige of structure to the whole.19 In many points, Keats creates tiny dust storms that whirl round at great speed, so that it is impossible to count the number of scenes of woods, meadows, groves, grottos, pergolas, 16

17

18 19

His sources are George Sandys’s 1632 translation of Ovid, Beaumont and Fletcher’s pastoral play, The Faithful Shepherdess, and, above all, Drayton’s two poems on the same subject. Lyly wrote a comedy called Endimion, but it has no connection with Keats’s poem. ‘An unacknowledged masterpiece’, in the words of V. Papetti, Endimione, Milano 1988 (back cover), who translates the poem with some very refined and inventive solutions, and provides an enthusiastic, impassioned introduction. A more cautious, restrictive verdict is passed on the poem by A. Lombardo, ‘Keats, Endymion e l’artista romantico’, in Ritratto di Enobarbo. Saggi sulla letteratura inglese, Pisa 1971, 199–248. The ‘thermometer of pleasure’ is thus defined by Wasserman 1967, 184: ‘a series of gradually increasing intensities which result in the assimilation of the subject in the essence, quite beyond all egoism’. Glaucus awaits a liberator, and tells Endymion about the wrong Circe has done him by casting a spell on Scylla and taking her away from him. Glaucus is a vicarious narrator who knows what to leave out and how to speed up a long story. According to a prophecy, Endymion will liberate him and Scylla. Venus commiserates with Endymion and gives him to understand that his love will triumph.

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rivers, flowery banks, lakes and ponds. Just as it is difficult to follow the indications and directions pertaining to the impalpable chiaroscuro effects of light, or the velvet quality of sounds, often followed by silences that whisper things imperceptible to human ear, and sensations ineffable that lead us back to Crashaw. Ekphrasis is, here more than ever, an essentially procedural mode; Keats was greatly influenced by the few great paintings he had seen with his own eyes, like those by Poussin, Lorrain and Titian. On the other hand, the poetry that describes the vastness of interstellar space is indebted to Milton, the blind bard whose ‘organ voice’ appeals to the ear, without reference to actual experience or objects. 5. The narrating ‘I’ is revealed in the proems to each of the four books of Endymion, and compromises and strains identification; it empathizes with the king of the shepherds of Latmos, who is endowed with the ability to explore the earth and dig below the crust; then he becomes a kind of diver visiting the depths of the ocean, and, at the end, an airman, the charioteer of winged horses that describe a circle and who falls to earth. Endymion lives marvellous mythological adventures despite the warnings of his sister. In the course of his journeys, to the centre of the earth, the bottom of the sea and the dizzy heights of air, this credulous shepherd (who cannot solve riddles, is entranced by various sights, and now and then gets lost) is on a dream hunt for a masked goddess. While he pursues an anthropomorphic moon, he speculates on her seductive, elusive manifestations and metamorphoses, which are duplicates or doubles of her hypostasis; in the end he finds himself faced by two alternative loves, which are, in fact, the same, since the last disguise of the goddess turns out to be the very Diana he has been looking for. When Endymion appears to accept the offer of the Indian maid to live with him as a sister and vestal of Diana,20 all of a sudden we have another metamorphosis, and the Indian maid, who was, at first, dark, becomes fair and blonde; she is Phoebe, or Diana, or Cynthia – all manifestations of the moon that Endymion has loved one after the other. The final objective is only reached after a series of episodes that are

20 The introduction of this character is totally casual and melodramatic, and may allude to the exotic ‘Abyssinian maid’ in Coleridge (§ 186.3).

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extraneous gems in the real sense of the word, mosaic tiles verbally transliterated from classical and neoclassical mythological art. § 197. Keats III: The two ‘Hyperions’ Hyperion, which Keats abandoned in 1818, 100 or so lines into the third book, springs from quite a different concept of the ‘long poem’. It has fewer scenes than Endymion, but these scenes are proportionally longer and elaborate, and the pace is slower; movements are large and majestic, hieratic and solemn, as befits Titans, and the dialogues are richly rhetorical. Action is limited or denied by sculptural staticity, again, as becomes a world of giants. In the first scene Saturn, presented as old, grey-haired and broken, has just been ousted, and is comforted by Thea; breaking the silence, the old god recalls his dethroning. In the cosmic setting, another Titan, Hyperion, appears, and renews the exclamations of scandalized indignation. Urged on by his father, Coelus, Hyperion summons the other Titans to a meeting in a cave to discuss what should be done. Oceanus asserts that surrender is inherent in the order of things; Clymene agrees that the law of succession is inexorable; Enceladus growls angrily. What there is of the third book shifts the focus to Apollo, who takes up Mnemosyne, a she-Titan descended from a god, and therefore a traitress. Shelley was to concentrate on a different mythological hypostasis, Prometheus, basing the versification on the precedents set by Keats, who must be credited with first having thought of the ‘plot’ of a generation of divine beings who acted for the good of created beings, and dispensed justice and benevolence, but now have been deposed. The council of Titans is a Homeric battle of ideas, filtered through Milton’s description of the infernal council in Paradise Lost. The slow pace allows for a procession of characters, like a marble frieze of resounding names from myth and history (a technique that Milton inherited from Marlowe). Like Satan’s angels, the Titans are ‘a fallen tribe’. Thea urges resignation and indolence, and wants to persuade Saturn to sleep. In terms of his own personal situation, Keats presents two opposing voices, one advising surrender, the other revolt. 2. Perhaps the first Hyperion was interrupted and abandoned because the diegesis is weak and there are few significant events. However, in my

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opinion, whatever other critics might say, there is no huge difference between this and the second poem, The Fall of Hyperion. Indeed, Keats, who usually took care to finish any poem he started, left this, like the first, unfinished, obviously dissatisfied by what he had done so far. In the first, the choice of blank verse as against rhyme led to a reduction in grandiloquence and Latinisms, but the style was still too Miltonic. Other influences were evident, too: the mythological setting is indebted to Burke’s sublime and the Titans are reminiscent of those of Blake’s prophetic books, as witnessed by the Michaelangiolesque anatomy given to Hyperion. Resumed in the summer of 1819, Hyperion was re-titled, but again work on it was interrupted after one complete canto and about sixty lines of the second. By now it is clear that Keats was more interested in the fallen Saturn than in the nominal hero of the poem; and, in fact, the poem breaks off when Hyperion enters. On the other hand, Keats excogitated the variant of a long prologue, which presents the same series of events as the first poem – Hyperion and the other Titans preparing, hypothetically, to return to power – but no longer as dramatic, objectivized action, but as a subjective inner vision of Keats as poet. This estranging effect is incorporated in a premise which approves of fanatics, savages, poets and dreamers as visionaries; it continues, describing the poet lingering in the usual Keatsian thicket full of fruit trees, whose produce is offered to the visitor as some sweet-smelling leftover from a heavenly banquet. The awakening from the dream results in a second vision, of a majestic nave that leads up to an altar on which a sacrificial fire burns. Invited by a Shade to continue upward, the poet learns from the oracular voice that only he who is afflicted by pain can rise to the altar. The dreamer’s unhappiness and solitude are compensated for by the dreams themselves and by the vision. As usual in Keats, the identities of the characters in the dreams are not revealed immediately. When the denouement comes, Moneta, Saturn’s priestess, remembering the war and the defeat of the Titans, leads the new poem to the same point of departure or arrival as the previous one. In a twilit vale, the huge shape of reclining Saturn is seen; Thea weeps endless sorrow for the fallen god. To the sculptural base of the scene, Keats adds pictorial elements as if inspired by Turner – fog, mist, and evanescence.

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§ 198. Keats IV: Poems of death-bearing and life-bringing love Keats’s most important book of poems, which soon became a milestone in nineteenth-century English poetry, and was judged to be the most significant collection of poems to appear in the entire century, was what is normally called the ‘Lamia volume’ (1820): it contained the ‘great odes’ universally recognized as his masterpieces, along with other medium-length poems. The only other important work not included in the volume, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, was published in Hunt’s periodical the same year, and was then included in the posthumous edition of Keats’s works in 1848; the Fall of Hyperion, instead, was published in 1856.21 There are no signs of the ambitious Titanism of the three previous poems; Keats seems to choose more contained dimensions. In the longer poems included in the Lamia volume, the subject and context are no longer taken from Greek mythology and Hesiod; and he puts to one side his infatuation with giants like Saturn and Hyperion. The sources now are Arthurian romance and Gothic or, at the very most, Hellenic. Keats leaves behind him the shade of Milton, and Dante, too, and dedicates himself to a narrative steeped in magic and fancy; halfway through, however, and in the form of a separate story inside a realistic story. The style is no longer high-sounding, solemn or emphatic; there are no vague, misty visions; instead, what we have is a restrained, accurate narrative of a fact, divided into segments, each of which occupies, in the continuum, a precise position, as if he had suddenly come across some hidden talent for construction, which excludes, therefore, any kind of emotive, heady empathy. Blank verse is abandoned, replaced by the heroic couplet or the Spenserian stanza. It may be asked if these poems are in any way connected in some kind of whole, and if they are, what the connecting elements are. They are all full of things that happen, and the story is recounted on one time plane, though not necessarily in the space of one day. In three of them (the most important), the plot turns on a love relationship between a man and a woman; in only one is young love rewarded by a happy ending, which is not described but suggested in the fade-out at the end. In the other two, the lovers remain separated and the finale is 21

The publication of all of Keats’s poetry took a long time, and various unedited poems appeared, one at a time, over a number of years, in the TLS.

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tragic: Isabella loses Lorenzo, and she herself dies, and Lamia is turned into a snake and then disappears before the eyes of Lycius, he, too, dying. These poems, to which might be added two or three more, have behind them no real, clear-cut tradition, If anything, they might be said to have been inspired by the Coleridge of the ‘Rime’ and Christabel. All three poems by Keats have, with respect to the two works by Coleridge, the same outer appearance of fable, with a texture of ritual images and themes taken from folklore and balladry. In one way, they are simple stories clearly told, and their attraction lies in their purely human interest. In other words, they would seem not to invite any complex interpretation on an allegorical or symbolic plane. Naturally, critics have attempted to see in them meanings that are not justified by the actual text. In general, there is no doubt that, in them, Keats is interested in erotic love and meditates on the human or chance obstacles that stand in its way, some of which can be overcome, others, instead, are tragically efficient. The tensions in the poems are symbolized by a number of elementary icastic oppositions, like the ‘iciness’ representing the ascetic life or the atrophied senses, or uncontrolled lust for money as against the heat of sexual passion. 2. The first five of the forty-two stanzas of ‘The Eve of St Agnes’22 present a monk, lying on his cot in the symbolic dominion of freezing cold, doing sleepless penance for himself and other sinners, now at a safe distance from the temptations of the flesh. He does not act like the Pharisee at the trumpets’ blast, but, conscious of approaching death, prays and waits. This incipit may allude to the parable of the foolish virgins, with the monk representing one of the wise ones. We might call him a Gothic monk, but not in the sense of ‘Monk’ Lewis: he is a monk who has succeeded in mastering the demands of the flesh, and also a Donne-like preacher, wearing a winding-sheet instead of a habit. On the upper floors of the abbey, a magnificent evening feast is about to begin, the guests indicated in the synecdoches of the diadem and feathers. The background, and the actual event that takes place, have to be inferred from incidental references, as no 22 Contextualized, it celebrates Keats’s love, requited, for Fanny Brawne; but Keats’s brother had just died, and his shadow is present in the poem. The poet had just visited the cold and wintry Stansted Abbey.

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precise information is given in this regard. Madeline, who appears in the sixth stanza, establishes an analogy with the praying monk: she, too, cares nothing for the imminent feast, and prepares herself for the rites of the eve of St Agnes, knowing that she will dream of her future husband. The third scenario – the whole poem consists of these interlocking scenes – sees the arrival, from the heath, of her lover, Porphyro. Daringly, unseen, he has come to look on his sleeping lover, who belongs to a rival family. He places himself in the hands of a ‘beldame’, a kind of old witch, who shortly after is revealed as having the antithetical name of Angela. The guests at the feast are described in grotesque terms, as blood-thirsty, snarling hyenas that would curse Porphyro’s house (to add to the grotesque, a dwarf appears out of nowhere). Porphyro, too, wears a hat with feathers; so great is his desire to see his love that he orders the beldame to take him to the room where Madeline lies sleeping, passing through a dark passageway that resembles a tomb. Of the four human characters, two – the monk and the beldame – are old and not far from death; the other two are young and bursting with life. Watched by the hidden Porphyro, Madeline undresses for bed, chastely attentive to the age-old rites. Certain that his loved one will soon be fast asleep, Porphyro lays the table with exotic fruit, which, however, remains untouched, since it is a sexual ersatz,23 like his action of seizing his lute and literally pouring his melodies into the ear of his beloved. Madeline catches her breath, pants and even moans. Before, Porphyro, too, has prayed to the saints, but to ask for success in his sexual expedition. The imaginary banquet will produce the typically Keatsian painful intoxication after an ecstasy conveyed by the equally typical word, ‘drowse’. On awakening, Madeline sees that her dream has come true: her lover is there in flesh and blood. In a way, Madeline had no need to dream of her beloved because the love troth had been sworn, though hampered, like that of Isabella and Lorenzo in ‘Isabella’. Taking advantage of the dawn, the drunkenness of the porter, and the heavy sleep of the dog (in Coleridge’s Christabel the dog fails to 23

The insertion of the fruit has often been judged a useless decoration, without noticeable internal links, for example by one of the first editors, W. M. Rossetti (quoted in Wasserman 1967, 113), whose sister, Christina, wrote the famous sex-fruit fantasy, ‘Goblin Market’.

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keep watch over the woman he is meant to guard) the two lovers escape in the storm. Once again, we have the usual play of ‘empty’ and ‘full’: the porter’s bottle is empty and the fetters fall ‘full easily’. The curtain falls on the baron, Madeline’s father, sleeping uneasily, on the beldame, Angela, who dies that very night, and on the monk who lies sleeping among cold ashes, a metaphor indicating that he, too, is dead. Critics who cannot accept that the ending should be happy, point meaningfully at the storm into which the two lovers disappear. 3. ‘Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil’ is a fast-moving story that makes good use of its source in Boccaccio; Keats the ‘architect’ re-assembles the material with skilful distributive calculations, weighing and assigning segments of varying lengths to the original stages of the tale. The poem does not aim at hypnotizing the reader; the narrating voice is also metanarrative, acting as a guide and commentary. As always, the poet begins by stating his intentions, and then immediately does something different: this time, Keats does have a ‘palpable design’, which is to criticize openly the grasping greed of Isabella’s brothers and extol the chaste love that binds Isabella and Lorenzo. He therefore presents to the reader three distinct visions of love, which become progressively more pessimistic, if we consider how ‘Lamia’ ends, not to mention ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, which, as will be seen, shows that Keats suffered from the hallucination of the devouring female by whom he wished to be dominated. In the poem, Isabella and Lorenzo live the chaste fulness of love, until Isabella persuades Lorenzo to stop talking and act: a kiss, or maybe something more daring. Fate lies in wait, however, ready to punish, like bees venturing to drink the nectar of poisonous flowers. The brothers, ‘Baalites’ in that they worship ‘impure wealth’, are totally unnatural: their sister’s marriage is ‘against their nature’, and, therefore, a crime. Tragic irony demands that they should stop to talk near a pot, a vase – not mythically charged like the ‘Grecian urn’, but, for Isabella, at least, sacred and symbolic, which tells a story that makes the brothers wonder, unable to accept that what provokes a trance should be a ‘very nothing’24 – a mere pot.

24 The reference, of course, is to the almost contemporary ‘Grecian urn’.

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4. ‘Lamia’ really does proceed snake-like, and welds together two distinct stories into one. In the first, Mercury lands on Crete; he is enamoured of a nymph, but comes across a snake – a female snake, it turns out – which tells him that the nymph he is looking for is invisible, and that she, the snake, is protecting her from the assault of satyrs. Like Porphyro, Mercury wants to spy on the lovely nymph and implores the help of the serpent which – this time Keats is free with information – has a ‘head like Circe’. They make a pact: if he wants to see the nymph the god must transform the snake into a woman. The story of Mercury and the nymph ends, and the one of the snake-woman begins: thus metamorphosed, and under the name of Lamia (which Lycius discovers only later) she sets out to look for Lycius of Corinth, finds him and immediately ensnares him with her magic spells. Lycius is completely in the power of the former snake, but the piercing look of a philosopher by the name of Apollonius manages to shake Lycius somewhat, and scare Lamia, too. She meditates secret plans of destruction in his regard, and, anyway, love threatens to become monotonous, in accordance with the pattern that the flame of love burns only as long as it is fed by passion; when the ecstasy ends, the flame goes out. The wedding feast given by Lycius exudes the extravagant, oriental atmosphere so typical of Keats, made up of penetrating perfumes and clouds of incense. The struggle between the bald philosopher and Lamia, who fears him, prefigures the fight between reason, which controls the mind during the day, and demonic passion, whose realm is the night. Lamia demands, in vain, that the philosopher should not be invited to the feast: his Gorgon-like look bleaches the colour from Lamia’s face, and drains all the beauty from her. She becomes a snake again and slithers off into the distance; Lycius falls to the ground, dead. If there is some kind of dynamic relationship between giving in to lasciviousness and the call of conscience, the key to the poem lies in the palace where the lovers celebrate their love: it is the abode of ‘sweet sin’. As we shall see in the ode to the nightingale, the poet declares himself ‘half in love with easeful death’ – these are the nuances that in Keats overturn perspectives – while here, the world is, for Lycius, ‘almost forsworn’. In ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ religion was seen as the obstacle to love; here it is cold philosophy.

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§ 199. Keats V: The great odes Keats’s most important odes are seven in number, of which four may be considered his masterpieces. They can be dealt with chronologically (as far as it is possible to ascertain the date of composition) or in order of publication, without, however, being able to bring to light any internal teleology, or clear progression or development, or even any dialectical, thematic or emotional connections.25 Each of these odes presents insurmountable contradictions with respect to the others, in a semantic field, not of relationships, but of numberless oppositions. They all emerged from a fit of inspiration lasting five to six months – or even less: maybe only the two intense months of April and May of 1819 – and their progress was reported on daily in letters to friends and family. Three of them consist of the description of a vision or object that is slowly brought into focus, analysed and decoded. Before it is entirely explained, it is interrogated. The hermeneutics, however, may be purely conjectural, and the reader – the poet admits in the text – can draw whatever conclusions he likes from the visual phenomenon the poet describes. So these great odes may confirm the epistemological context of Romanticism itself, especially that of Coleridge; in other words they represent the quest for the noumenon by means of the phenomenon. A fourth ode centres on an auditory experience, and, therefore, interrogates a sound. The subject of a Keatsian ode is usually announced in a short prelude. A further structural parallel lies in the uncertainty following the experience – immediately after, though it may be revealed before – as to whether a similar elevated encounter between the ‘I’ and the object (or sight) is a dream, a vision, or some intermediate stage classified as a ‘waking dream’. Once again we find an oscillation from optimism to pessimism and back, between the abandonment to the imagination and its dissolution, followed by a sudden or gradual return to reality. The poetic subject, in other words, seeks a euphoric mood different to the one from which he starts, and exults when he achieves it, but then the Panic 25

The last to be composed, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ was the first to be published, but, as we have seen, was not included in the 1820 Lamia and other poems. ‘Lamia’, in turn, is in the middle of the second group of four and ‘To Autumn’, which was followed, before Keats’s death, by fragments, among which The Fall of Hyperion.

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fusion ends and the subject realizes that it was only a fleeting moment and cannot, by its very nature, last. The poet has touched eternity, and enjoyed the sensations linked to sublime beauty; now he must come back down to earth, where sorrow and inevitable decay are his and mankind’s lot. 2. ‘Ode to Psyche’ and ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ are visibly linked by the subject: the poet observes an erotic encounter, actually happening or just desired, in a pagan setting; in one case, it is a typically Keatsian ‘waking dream’, in the other, the absorbed contemplation of an urn. The urn, with its figures described on the curving surface, is central to the ‘Ode on Indolence’, too. In the ode to (not on)26 Psyche, the prelude expresses the sense of wonder caused by the vision, and, with an evident denegation, announces that the following verses will be out of tune and jarring. The poet is ‘sweetly constrained’ to write them, he says; he sings the secrets of Psyche only for the ears of one who is already privy to them, demonstrating an extraordinary respectfulness; but whispering secrets only to those whom they concern is equivalent to keeping them, not revealing them. What follows is the deciphering of two entwined figures, whose sex cannot be established except by the title. The stream, too, that runs near the wood is ‘scarcely visible’. The two figures lie in an ambiguous position because it seems they are about to say goodbye, or else to redouble the kisses exchanged at the height of their passion. At last they are recognized as Love and Psyche, and a hymn is raised to the ‘human and too human goddess’ (to use Nietzsche’s expression) whose legend as a human who becomes divine is contemporary to the story of Christ. The poet proclaims euphorically that he is her high priest, and promises imaginary rites, in a context of a nature luxuriant with fronds and flowers. In his imagination, the poet orchestrates the future trysts of Love and Psyche in the temple of his mind, satiated by their eternal repetition. Not at all electrified by love is the poet of the ode to Indolence (signifying, here, a momentary mood of not unpleasant boredom and tiredness aggravated by the summer heat). It might seem a variant, or anticipation of the ode on the Grecian urn, were it not for two factors: from the start, the tone is anecdotal – ‘One morn before me were three figures seen’ – and 26 The difference is important: hymns and odes are written to, while meditations or rhapsodies are on.

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the genre is that of ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’, at least up to the mimetically trembling final moment. Furthermore, while it is true that there is a referential process of divination that leads to interpreting the three figures on the basis of subjective allegorical and symbolic parameters – and the three are presented as passing before the poet’s eyes in a kind of dance or ring, as if they were depicted on an urn – the urn itself is not present in the poem, unlike in the ode on the Grecian urn; at the end of the poem in question, the poet refers to a ‘dreamy urn’. Before being identified, the three figures are urged by the poet to intervene in his drowsiness: he wants to rise and undertake some kind of action. He imagines that they might represent powers like love, ambition and poetry, forces that inspire and urge men to action. Implicitly and obliquely, he is confessing that there is nothing that can move him in that particular moment. Actually, with a change of direction in mid-poem, he ends up by invoking and celebrating a kind of poetry that, far from inciting to action, numbs and lulls to sleep the poetic ‘I’; at least, it makes his torpor more pleasing and less tedious. Here the poet propounds the equation of poetry with indolence, an indolence as beckoning as the scene of a shady field full of flowers, with a sky slightly cloudy but not threatening rain, windows open on a vineyard – in short, a picture of normal happiness, with no ecstatic joy but no heart-rending sorrow, either. As I mentioned, in the last line the indolent poet banishes the three hypostases, including poetry; he is satisfied with ‘faint visions’ to see him through his days and nights. 3. In the first stanza of the ode on the Grecian urn,27 there are two vocatives and three metaphors, of which two are sexual, and self-contradictory. The urn is a ‘still unravished bride’, and also an adopted daughter of ‘silence’ and ‘slow time’, itself an approximation of a-temporality. There is a sense of nostalgia, or at least an emphasis on an ideal state of virginity and protection against sensuality. The very pipes play a de-sensualized tune. Instead, the men on the urn are depicted in the throes of passion, 27 Keats may have drawn inspiration from the so-called ‘Sosibios urn’ in the Louvre, or from others, on which the relief figures do not, however, correspond with those described in the poem. So Keats wrote his ode on an Urn, rather than on some urn or other.

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while the virgins are shy.28 The adverbs, ‘still’ and ‘forever’, underscore the idea of the stilled image that keeps fresh and alive a desire that might otherwise fade before it can be satisfied, and of the immortality of love and beauty itself. The end of the third stanza explicitly indicates that desire nauseates and leaves a burning in the tongue. The other metaphor in the opening lines is taken from the field of writing: the urn is addressed as a ‘sylvan historian’, who uses pictures instead of words to unroll a circular story or fable that is far sweeter than verse or words. The circle, and the round urn with it, symbolize perfection; the expressiveness of the pictorial forms exceeds that of the written word. On the surface of the urn, which is seen as a writer, the fables are sweeter because they are conveyed by a purely visual medium. At this point, Keats’s enquiry initiated in the ode to Psyche reaches a kind of climax: he interrogates the objects he sees on the side of the vase: are they gods or men? Where are they going? Why are the virgins so bashful? Why the chase? There is no answer; anyone can offer his or her own explanation, though one should not forget the oxymoronic axiom that silence is sweetest, and sweeter still the music of silence. How is one to interpret this? Is it the music, the melodies, we imagine when we look at the players and their instruments on the urn? But then, in a leap, the poet begins to speak of that melody as infinite and the gestures of the figures as frozen in time. He adds that the gestures are unfinished, and the kiss an action begun but not completed, and therefore not enjoyed. It is a compensation phenomenon: beauty will not fade, but the kiss can never be completed. In the third stanza, the player depicted plays songs forever new, in the sense of sounding so to new listeners endowed with imagination. The love portrayed on the urn will also be forever happy and still to be enjoyed, thus linking up with the word ‘unravished’ in the first line. The fourth and fifth stanzas, the penultimate and ultimate, celebrate the urn as an antidote against sorrow for present and future generations. The urn is eternal when compared with the passing of time and its effect on

28

The two scenes described on the urn are a young man chasing a maiden, and a mare being led to sacrifice on a green altar; one might see here an Dionysian-Apollonian tension.

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human beings. But the apposition, ‘Cold pastoral’, in the middle of the last stanza initiates a subterranean process of possible criticism of the coldness, albeit immortal, of the urn, to which a more desirable alternative is seen in the warmth of life and living, transient though it be. As to the famous crux of the final couplet (‘“Beauty is truth, and truth beauty” – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know’), it was long thought crucial to decide who pronounces the words after the dash, whether the urn or the poet. If it is the urn, the message, far from being silent, would be very audible, coming from one so chaste and coy and given to pictorial, not verbal, expression. If, instead, the words are understood as being spoken by the poet, then T. S. Eliot was justified in criticizing an ending with such a ‘palpable design’ on the reader, and which actually explains the meaning of the poem. In this Keats would not be allowing ‘poetry to speak for itself ’. As a comment on these lines, resort is often had to a similar expression in the letters: ‘What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth – whether it existed before or not’; the urn, in the third last line is ‘a friend to man’. Considering what has been said above, the final couplet might be seen as sibylline, ambiguous, or even an ironic counter-truth. It is not beauty that is truth so much as sorrow and transience. The urn is indeed a ‘historian’, but the history it recounts is not necessarily true. 4. The opening of the ode to the nightingale is possibly the most mimetic in all the odes, and enters directly into a description of an event that has just happened or is still in course. The hemlock, which stands for a sleeping draught, evokes Socrates, his firmness and his stoic teachings, just as the nightingale can afford an overflow of happiness and have some to spare, while the poet is desperately lacking of the same. The first stanza is one of the most intriguing examples of the Keatsian opposition of ‘empty’ and ‘full’: the hemlock cup is empty while the nightingale’s song is ‘full-throated’; shortly after, one suspects that a draught of wine is stimulating and has an opposite effect to that of the hemlock, though it is invoked only as an aid for the imagination. But the objective is the same – to forget – but now, in the virtual, ideal company of the nightingale, who knows nothing of human suffering. The second stanza introduces an abrupt change of metaphor, exalting wine, which, though ‘cool’, tastes of the parched south; the wine is the imagination and the dream-inducing

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medium to reach the nightingale and fly to the shady grove where he sits singing; so, the wine is euphoria-inducing and energizing to the same degree as hemlock is depressing and paralyzing. The third stanza returns to the nightingale; its essence is identified in ignorance just as the poet’s is synonymous with knowledge; but the register has already become too explicit. The fourth stanza indicates in poetry itself an aid, together with wine, to help the poet soar in spirit towards the nightingale, and he would do, were it not for reason. This does not prevent him from remembering at least one moment of ecstasy deriving from this unison. In synaesthesia, light and darkness and lightning flashes are part of this trance, a trance that cannot last. The conclusion is that, rather than live, it is better to die, but die accompanied by the song of the nightingale. There is still time for another feat of imagination: the nightingale becomes the symbol of eternity, and as such is seen in other times and other places, with the poet identifying with the biblical Ruth. The ode becomes a new parable to represent the difficult task of bringing into focus an impressionistic object: the song of the nightingale, at first a hymn an die Freude, modulates to a dark requiem, then to an anthem, in the sense of a funeral dirge. The poet, lucid once more, and sorrowful, forces himself back to the hic et nunc; immortality is illusive and delusive. Musically speaking, the nightingale begins with a brisk allegro, or, at least, as such it was interpreted by the poet; in the end its warbling is decoded by the poet, or by his disilluded self, as a lament or dirge. The nightingale is immortal, and, therefore, inhuman, like the Grecian urn. In fact, it fades, and flies off to spread its joy to other parts of the wood. The poet wonders if he has been dreaming or waking; in the end, he confirms that the meaning of the experience must remain subjective and the fruit of suggestion. 5. Right from the opening lines, the ‘Ode on Melancholy’ seems to look in the direction of Hopkins’s ‘terrible sonnets’,29 mainly because the enunciation – spontaneous and therefore fragmented and, even, confused – of a virile determination to rise up from a state of prostration and act, is retracted and denied in the space of the three stanzas that make up the

29 Particularly, ‘Carrion Comfort’.

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poem, so that the poet ends up by confessing that his weakness and impotence are destined to return always and cannot be extirpated. The initial mood is one of a masochistic cupio dissolvi, of which the poet tastes the energy-draining sweetness; the intermittent attacks of melancholy are presented as a funeral veil lowered, like a shroud, onto the sufferer. On the other hand, ‘satiating sorrow’ is equivalent to calling sorrow even more biting when compared with the perfect forms of nature, like the rose, the rainbow or the peony. Sadistic, however, is the act of one who, sans merci, seizes a woman by the wrists and thrusts her to her knees. The third, and last, stanza identifies the Feminine with Beauty, but then, immediately, retracts: Beauty must die, as must joy and passion. By means of imagery taken from eating, in the last line of the second stanza – the satiety of pain – Keats seems to suggest that eros disgusts and nauseates him, therefore he will refrain. Melancholy is, with indolence, another hypostasis dear to the poet: a veiled vestal visible only to her priests, she ends up by displaying the same sadism as the poet, when he feels the sadness of her power, and his satisfaction at being placed ‘among her trophies’. The spiritual turmoil is vaguely the same as in ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’,30 a ballad, all of a sudden ‘emptied’, by a poet that began his career under the banner of abundance and, indeed, extravagance. ‘La Belle Dame’ is succinct, terse, unadorned, with antipodal paratactic diction, the same number of words distributed economically over twelve quatrains for a total of forty-eight lines. At the same time, the song gradually becomes a verbal loom where repetitions, synonyms, and antonyms call out to one another from a distance, not to mention the narcotic effect of refrains, syntactic parallelisms, anaphoras and syntagmatic reiterations near and far. In the first three stanzas, a stylized nature acts as correlative to the wan and weary knight with his desolation, later contrasted with the granary overflowing with the harvest. The birds are absent, and therefore silent, and then the squirrel frolics in the granary. The drought passes from the lakeside to the human visage; like dew are the pearly drops of feverish sweat, and then the restorative manna given by the woman. The adjective 30 This ballad is quoted, with its title, in ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, causing a threatening effect on the symbolic progress of the poem.

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‘full’ is used three times to refer to the granary, the woman’s beauty and her lament; her eyes are ‘wild’ and so is the honey; the dose is doubled and her eyes become ‘wild wild’ when the knight is led in a trance to her ‘elfin grot’. In the fourth stanza, the knight begins his retrospective monologue; he is barely conscious that he is presenting the fated Romantic demonic hidden in ‘her wild eyes’, but he realizes deep down that the woman only seems, or has seemed to love. In fact, the knight admits he has been blinded because he sees nothing but the woman. When sleeping, he has a nightmare populated by pale faces, which represent his state of mind. The knight has been spared by the destructive ‘belle dame’, but at the price of an inactive solipsism which – the last stanza repeats the words in the first with the addition of a ‘though’ – draws no comfort from nature; he is chained to a place he would fly from since it is so hostile. 6. Re-using a title with ‘to’ instead of ‘on’ and minus the genre indicator, ‘ode’, ‘To Autumn’ announces its vocative nature and its hymnal quality, along with its special predisposition for ellipses. The first of the three eleven-line stanzas contains a series of appositions or vocatives without finite verbs, and a long secondary clause without a main clause. The second and third stanzas begin with rhetorical questions, to which answers are given; the third addresses directly the personification of the season. Autumn is presented as fullness, ripeness and swelling, like a woman with child. It is the chaste union of the sun with the season that produces abundance, and ripens the harvest of fruits that weigh heavy on the boughs of the trees. Their flowers beckon to the bees in a never-ending, purposeful metamorphic cycle within a bountiful, self-sufficient eco-system. The second stanza adds personifications of indolence, torpor, and patience. The third finds the spectacle of autumn in no way inferior to that of spring, like the rosy light of evening and the river banks, and a whole host of animals, insects and birds and their sounds, each given their precise names – bleating, twittering or whistling. In its relative brevity, this ode has always appeared to English-speaking readers the most perfect, economical and essential description of nature in the whole of English literature, precisely because Keats manages to keep under control his propensity for contorted reasoning, and gives free rein, instead, to his great lyrical gift. Thus it has been long considered to be the only work of the mature Keats that is untouched by the pessimism that elsewhere veins his poems, and the only

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one in which the explicit contents are not, in some way, contradicted and set at naught by an implicit meaning. It would be naïve to think that the poem was conceived after he had met, by pure chance, the public accuser of the Peterloo Massacre, arrested because of his fiery speeches in favour of the workers killed during the demonstration near Manchester; or to add that Keats did write a letter showing how struck he was by these events, so that the ode might be seen as an extemporary expression of exultation at this meeting. Diametrically opposite are recent poststructuralist interpretations that have made a feeble attempt to find hidden subtexts, arguing that history and current affairs were not ignored by Keats, so much so that ‘To Autumn’ can be read as a protest against the policy of enclosures. With all that, in the poem some indications can be found of frustration, even of apocalyptic panic, at the symbolic end of a season; the first of these signs is the rather sinister word ‘conspiring’ in line 3,31 immediately swallowed up, however, by the consoling enumeration of all of autumn’s gifts. Yet a threatening shadow does loom in the excessive, and guilty (or, at least, ambiguous) indifference of autumn (presented as some kind of opium addict), and, above all, in the scythe that ‘spares the next swath’, or the ‘last oozings’ of the cider. These very spectacles of autumn give an idea of imminent death, though they also convey the notion of residual vitality. I would agree, however, that impermanence is ‘accepted without the slightest trace of sadness’,32 as part of a wider and richer permanence. § 200. Byron* I: Phases and forms of Byron’s self-fashioning The Jamesian ‘figure in the carpet’ in the case of George Gordon (1788– 1824), from 1798 sixth Lord Byron, is the conquest of independence. He 33

31 32

It is used in this sense in Shakespeare’s sonnet 10, line 6. Mayhead 1967, 96.

*

The historical edition of the poetical works, ed. E. H. Coleridge and R. E. Prothero, 13 vols, London 1898–1904, is now superseded by Complete Works, ed. J. J. McGann, 7 vols, Oxford 1980–1993. Don Juan, ed. T. G. Steffan, E. Steffan and W. W. Pratt, Harmondsworth 1973. Letters and Journals, ed. L. A. Marchand, 12 vols, London and Cambridge, MA 1973–1982 (plus a thirteenth in 1994), and a selection in one vol., Cambridge, MA 1982. The Complete Miscellaneous Prose, ed. A. Nicholson, Oxford

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1991. The whole of Byron had already been translated into Italian by the end of the nineteenth century. Some modern translations of the poetry and letters are: Opere scelte, ed. T. Kemeny, with an essay by G. Tomasi di Lampedusa (743–54), Milano 1993, 2009; Vita attraverso le lettere, ed. M. d’Amico, Torino 1989; Diari, ed. M. Skey, Roma and Napoli 1996. For Don Juan only, the complete nineteenth-century translation by V. Betteloni in ottava rima is worth remembering, and its first four cantos are reproduced in Don Giovanni, ed. A. Brilli, Milano 1982. Selections from Don Juan, ed. S. Saglia, Montichiari 1987, ed. G. Dego, Milano 1992 (canto I, in rhyme), and in Poesia straniera – Inglese, ed. F. Marucci, Part I, Firenze 2004, 656–753 (cantos I and II). Life. L. A. Marchand, Byron: A Portrait, 3 vols, London 1957, one-volume abridgement, Byron: A Portrait, Chicago, IL 1970; L. Crompton, Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in 19th Century England, Berkeley, CA 1985; P. Grosskurth, Byron: The Flawed Angel, London 1997; B. Eisler, Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame, London 1999; C. Franklin, Byron: A Literary Life, New York 2000; M. Garrett, George Gordon, Lord Byron, Oxford 2001; F. MacCarthy, Byron: Life and Legend, London 2014. Criticism. C. M. Fuess, Lord Byron as a Satirist in Verse, New York 1912, London 1964; E. C. Mayne, Byron, 2 vols, New York 1912 and, rev., 1924; M. Praz, La fortuna di Byron in Inghilterra, Firenze 1925; C. du Bos, Byron, et le Besoin de la Fatalité, Paris 1929, Eng. trans., London and New York 1932; W. J. Calvert, Byron: Romantic Paradox, Chapel Hill, NC 1935; P. Quennell, Byron: The Years of Fame, London 1935, and Byron in Italy, London 1941; E. W. Marjarum, Byron as Skeptic and Believer, Princeton, NJ 1938; E. F. Boyd, ‘Don Juan’: A Critical Study, New Brunswick, NJ 1945, London 1958; P. G. Trueblood, The Flowering of Byron’s Genius: Studies in Byron’s ‘Don Juan’, Palo Alto, CA 1945, Lord Byron, Boston, MA 1977, and, as editor, Byron’s Political and Cultural Influence in Nineteenth-Century Europe: A Symposium, London 1981; H. Read, Byron, London 1951; E. M. Butler, Byron and Goethe: Analysis of a Passion, London 1956; T. S. Eliot, ‘Byron’, in On Poets and Poetry, New York 1957, 223–39 (1st edn 1937); R. Escarpit, Lord Byron: Un tempérament littéraire, 2 vols, Paris 1957; G. M. Ridenour, The Style of ‘Don Juan’, New Haven, CT 1960; P. West, Byron and the Spoiler’s Art, New York 1960; D. Langley Moore, The Late Lord Byron: Posthumous Dramas, London 1961; A. Rutherford, Byron: A Critical Study, Palo Alto, CA 1961, Edinburgh and London 1962, also editor of CRHE, London and New York 1970, and of Byron Augustan and Romantic, London 1990; A. Horn, Byron’s ‘Don Juan’ and the Eighteenth-Century English Novel, Bern 1962; W. H. Marshall, The Structure of Byron’s Major Poems, Philadelphia, PA 1962; P. L. Thorslev, Jr, The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes, Minneapolis, MN 1962; S. C. Chew, The Dramas of Lord Byron, New York 1964; M. K. Joseph, Byron, the Poet, London 1964; L. A. Marchand, Byron’s Poetry: A Critical Introduction, London 1965; Twentieth Century Interpretations of ‘Don Juan’, ed. E. E. Bostetter, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1969, also author of The Romantic Ventriloquists:

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was the creator of his own myth, and condemned posterity to depend on it, inducing readers and admirers to consider the events of his life as more important than his writings, so that they became slaves to the posthumous fascination of his life. This has been, until recently, accompanied by a certain condescension and indulgence towards most of his works. It can be said that both life and works existed as a function of this one, overriding concern. His life gives the first indication of this ‘mission’. First of all, he felt the need to be independent of his parents, though he could never shake off his mother’s rather morbid attachment; physically impaired in one sense, he wished to be perfectly formed, as emerges from one of his apparently most extravagant works.1 He was forever trying to lose weight so as not to spoil his physique. Byron’s transgressiveness found expression above all in matters of sexuality. He had, or professed to have had, scores of women of every social class and nationality; he was also bisexual, and had an incestuous relationship with his sister. From his wife, he demanded all kinds of perversions and, in the end, left her. So, he certainly went out of his way to Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Byron, Seattle, WA 1963; G. Wilson Knight, Byron and Shakespeare, London 1966; A. Barton, Byron and the Mythology of Fact, Nottingham 1968; W. P. Elledge, Byron and the Dynamics of Metaphor, Nashville, TN 1968; R. F. Gleckner, Byron and the Ruins of Paradise, Baltimore, MD 1968, also editor of Critical Essays on Lord Byron, Boston, MA 1991; J. J. McGann, Fiery Dust, Chicago, IL 1968, Don Juan in Context, Chicago, IL 1976, and Byron and Romanticism, Cambridge 2002; A. Brilli, Il gioco del ‘Don Juan’. Byron e la satira, Ravenna 1971; J. D. Jump, Byron, London and Boston, MA 1972, also editor of Byron: A Symposium, London 1975; B. Taborski, Byron and the Theatre, Salzburg 1972; P. Manning, Byron and His Fictions, Detroit, MI 1978, 1990; H. de Almeida, Byron and Joyce through Homer: ‘Don Juan’ and ‘Ulysses’, London 1981; B. Beatty, Byron’s ‘Don Juan’, London 1985, and ‘Don Juan’ and Other Poems, Harmondsworth 1987; C. Franklin, Byron’s Heroines, Oxford 1992, and Byron, London 2007; M. Haslett, Byron’s ‘Don Juan’ and the Don Juan Legend, Oxford 1997; F. Marucci, ‘Don Giovanni in Europa’, in ‘Le donne, i cavalier, l’arme, gli amori’. Poema e romanzo: la narrativa lunga in Italia, ed. F. Bruni, Venezia 2001, 229–51; J. Stabler, Byron, Poetics and History, New York and Cambridge 2002; The Cambridge Companion to Byron, ed. D. Bone, Cambridge 2004; A. Fleming, Byron the Maker: Liberty, Poetry and Love, Brighton 2009; Byron’s Poetry, ed. P. Cochran, Newcastle 2012; R. Lansdown, The Cambridge Introduction to Byron, Cambridge 2012. 1

§ 204.4.

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scandalize. Seduction, promiscuity and incest are, for Byron, iconoclastic acts against the Calvinism of predestination (especially predestination to evil and damnation),2 a moot point that arises often, and when it does, takes on the form of flirting with atheism or, even, Catholicism.3 It might be as well to mention, at the very start of this discussion, the explicit standpoint of his ‘dramatic poem’ Cain, about the Biblical murderer damned by a hereditary curse he does not deserve (‘without having shared the apple’).4 The diagnosis traced his condition back to the root cause: Byron suffered from anxiety caused by his moral lapses, or he actually invited scandal and social condemnation by continuing to ‘sin’.5 However, what is more visible and legendary in Byron is his belief in ideological, ethical and political independence. His support for the liberation movements of various oppressed nations was almost theatrical; his enemies were turncoats, and anyone not intellectually independent. On a purely literary level, his independence is expressed in style, metre, prosody and contents; he rebels against the accepted models of the day, and denounces the tired repetition of by now meaningless formulas. He always seeks the new, but does so not by breaking down old forms, like the modernists, but by taking from the past old models and breathing new life into them. His best poetry is unpredictable: it does not meet expectations, it dives from the sublime to the trivial and soars from the everyday to the sublime; it stands to reason, therefore, that he often makes use of the rhetorical figures of bathos and anti-climax. 2. There have always been more biographies of Byron than analyses of his poetry, as is the case with all literary myths. For two centuries now, the 2

Cf. the extremely clear summary of this interior debate in McGann 1968, 247–50. The following pages of McGann argue that Byron gradually shifted towards Socinianism. 3 Cf. McGann 1968, 252–3. 4 II. ii, l. 159. 5 Drawing a comparison with Nietzsche, Russell (HWP, 716–21, contesting Goethe’s accusation of intellectual puerility), claims that Nietzsche goes beyond the phase of Satanism and the tormented Titan because he rids himself of God, while the Übermensch is not the equivalent of Byron, who, as we have seen, though originally a Calvinist, had a latent leaning towards Catholicism, and was astounded to find that Shelley was an atheist. Sexually, too, Byron was soon disgusted by all varieties of sexual experience, and sought in his relationships, not a lover, but a mother.

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neophyte and the common reader have heard of him through echoes of sensational events, often exaggerated by reports, and extraordinary deeds that have since become proverbial. His mere name conjures up the decayed noble family into which he was born, his straitened childhood, made worse by his club foot and consequent lameness, his inheriting the title of lord at the age of ten, the stormy relationship of the fatherless boy with his widowed mother, and, above all, his incest with his half-sister, Augusta; the subsequent break-up of his marriage, the long list of lovers scattered wherever he wandered throughout the Continent, especially Italy; the disinterested support given to various independence movements, in particular to the Italian Risorgimento; finally, the wretched circumstances of his death in Greece at thirty-six. The general public knows comparatively little of, and reads even less from, his vast poetic output spanning seventeen years. The general consensus nowadays is that in Byron’s vast oeuvre (the fruit of incredible activity on the part of a man who lived life to the full, and, in what he wrote, cared little for the so-called labor limae) two poems tower above the rest: his first and his last with, between them, a variety of works in different genres, like short lyrics,6 verse satires, Turkish tales, drama (though meant to be read, not performed on stage). A third masterpiece, much loved by the reading public, and at times preferred to the poetry, is composed of his letters and travel diaries. All these works, however, have been devalued and snubbed – some of them, at least – by Byron buffs and custodians of his myth outside the strictly academic circuit. The premise implicit in this reception is that Byron should be read filtered through the sieve of an anthology, whereas his life is so fascinating that not even a less than mediocre biographer could spoil it. The result has been that some excellent authors and critics have also been spell-bound by the Byronic magic, and have tried their hands at writing on him, like a plethora

6

A dozen or so poems, written on various occasions throughout his life, have become well-known anthology pieces. Some form part of the collection of Hebrew Melodies, twenty-four in all and set to music by a Jewish composer (one was actually set by Mendelssohn). Ignoring Wordsworth’s advice, Byron imitates the artificial poetic diction he so often criticizes.

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of pianists playing the same score, each with his own personal touch.7 The chief ingredient of the above-mentioned magic is a life that is not long, but long enough to offer material to the biographer; a life, furthermore, lived at breakneck speed, with no lack of drama, scandal, or sensational and piquant events. Most of the remarkable components of the various biographical extravaganzas did actually happen, but some were ‘made to happen’: it is as if Byron were writer and director of his own biopic for future generations. As in the case of Wilde and the Decadents, in Byron life preceded art, and he acted out what he was about to write about or was writing at that particular moment. Art followed life rather than vice versa. He consciously struck legendary poses and re-enacted the feats of heroes, as when, wanting to prove himself to be another Leander, he swam the Hellespont in 1809. More than anything, he was putting on an act for posterity, preparing the foundations for an altar that was to serve in the Byronic cult. However, he could also be unpredictably anti-Byronic, and turn pathos into bathos. Only recently has the suspicion that Byron was a poseur become less widespread. Everything he did was aimed at pointing up his individuality in order to compensate for his club foot; amongst his idiosyncrasies was his insistence on travelling everywhere with an entourage of dogs, cats and monkeys, besides the usual serving staff. Now, the Byronic hero that, for over a century, was the talk of the town, country and Continent, is a mixture of various types, including the Hamlet-like melancholic obsessed by some unforgiveable crime or sin. Praz, rather mechanically, traces the source back to Radcliffe’s Schedoni and Moore’s

7

Tomasi di Lampedusa, to give only one example, wrote a short biography which was then inserted into his History of English literature (LAM, vol. II, 37–81, also summarized in Kemeny 1993). In my opinion, this is one of the most enjoyable and perspicacious parts of the whole book: a critical chapter slightly out of the ordinary (in fact, it is the longest section dedicated to any author by Lampedusa), rich in well-chosen anecdotes that are commented on and re-told with gusto, along with numerous examples of critical insight. That said, it must be taken with a pinch of salt, especially as regards the life, since Lampedusa is not averse to pure invention and, sometimes, falsification of biographical data.

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Zeluco,8 accentuating the sadism inherent in these figures.9 The Byronic myth of the rebel and homme fatal immediately took root alongside other active stereotypes like those I have mentioned above, as well as characters from Schiller and, of course, ‘Monk’ Lewis. With his many exotic or oriental verse tales, forerunners of the sensationalistic literature that was to become fashionable fifty years later, and his two ‘Venetian’ plays, Byron was a veritable storehouse of themes and stories for painters like Delacroix and ‘popular’ composers like Berlioz and Verdi. 3. Notwithstanding his immense popularity, Byron soon began to slip down the official table of ‘authors to be read’. The first blow was delivered by Carlyle, with his famous admonishment: ‘Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe’. The rejection of the Byronic was, in part, hypocritical, and masked a hard core of admiration and fascination that was to outlast other, more passing, fads. Southey denounced him as the founder of a ‘Satanic’ school of poetry (a few years later, exorcized by a far more modest judge, a less impious ‘fleshly school’ was ushered into the world by Rossetti).10 Byron was relentless in his mockery of contemporary poets, but was repaid in kind in one of Peacock’s novels. In the same year as Carlyle’s invitation to stop reading Byron, Macaulay provided a balanced Romantic interpretation, which went against such classical concepts as ‘correctness’, so dear to the Augustans. Macaulay argued that Byron was ‘also’ Romantic, and therefore contained a bit of the old together with much that was new. At the end of his long essay, he expresses the hope that the Byronic myth will be put to one side to make room for a (re-)reading of his works – imperfect, no doubt, but full, too, of literary gold that will last as long as the English language lives. Matthew Arnold’s 1881 essay describes Byron as ‘approximate’, unrefined, linguistically lacking, sloppy and uncouth, and quotes Goethe, who defines him naturally talented, but childish in reasoning, nonetheless great in terms of energy and sincerity. The ostracism of Byron was to last more than a century, up to and including T. S. Eliot. In the 1930s, left-wing 8 9 10

Naturally, John (1729–1802), and not Thomas, Moore, a Scottish doctor who wrote this now forgotten novel (1786). The setting is switched to the East, however (PRA, 60–81). Volume 4, § 191.6.

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critics made a timid attempt to rehabilitate him as a defender of the Luddites and supporter of Italians and Greeks in their struggle for independence. His reputation on the Continent, instead, remained stable for almost fifty years; he was especially popular in Germany, thanks also to the esteem in which he was held by Goethe. As for his reception in Italy, Praz pointed out that his ‘imitators’ were mostly minor Romantic authors, primarily from the south of Italy. For Mazzini, Byron was ‘an apparition […] of the eternal spirit of the intellect’; Monti was generous in his praise; only Leopardi (in his Zibaldone) and Tommaseo stood aloof.11 Of course, the enthusiasm for Byron was also a direct consequence of his support for the Risorgimento. His homme fatal pose was taken up, with one or two corrections, by D’Annunzio. The period between the two World Wars saw a total eclipse of the Byronic, as shown in the sadistic hectoring by Emilio Cecchi. 4. Edmund Blunden suggested a division of Byron’s poetic career into seven periods: 1) an insignificant and uninfluential first book of poems; 2) ‘English Bards’, a ferocious satire in the manner of Pope or Dryden; 3) Childe Harold; 4) Turkish tales; 5) the last two books of Childe Harold and the poems that followed; 6) the verse dramas; 7) Don Juan. These works might be said to lean towards one of two poles, the Romantic, and, more vaguely, the classical. But they are not consecutive, with, in the middle, the watershed of 1816; rather, they cohabit, and constitute yet another alternation, or imbalance or disparity in Byron. The fact is, he was as progressive in politics as he was conservative in poetry: an aristocrat who sided with radicals and venerated Napoleon, and a bitter satirist who was capable of writing the purest, most sublime poetry. He invites an inverted comparison with Ben Jonson, another ‘classical’ mind embodied in a Romantic temperament. Byron might be defined a consummate chameleon or ventriloquist:

11

C. Franklin (TLS, 11 March 2011, 5) reminds us that Gioberti denounced Byron as a ‘curse for the whole of Europe’ and opposed his canonization during the Risorgimento; she adds that, unlike the revolutionaries, the neo-Guelphs disapproved of him because of his libertinism and religious scepticism. Byron came back into favour with fascism, and was admired by Mussolini. The subject is examined in depth by E. Zuccato, ‘The Fortunes of Byron in Italy (1810–1870)’, in The Reception of Byron in Europe, ed. R. A. Cardwell, London 2004, 80–97.

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at the same time, he is, with Pope, the greatest satirical poet in the English language. He wrote no prose, except for a few unfinished drafts. Some have wondered what the result would have been if he had ventured into the field of the novel – in the manner of Lewis or Radcliffe, or, given Don Juan, of Sterne or Smollett. So, he is not Romantic in the sense of Wordsworth or Coleridge; nor can he be compared with Blake, or even Shelley. Since his lyrical gift is somewhat limited, he bears no relation to Keats, of whom, by the way, he had a very low opinion. What most of all divided Byron from the other Romantics is the role of the imagination: in a famous antithesis, Keats, the poet of imagination, said that Byron wrote only of what he saw; and Shelley, too, is typically a poet of the oneiric rhapsody and of the immaterial world. Concerned only with immanent reality, Byron ignores the gleams of the transcendental in life and nature; his descriptions are one-dimensional, fast-moving, but totally lacking in the numinous.12 Satire, which in the other Romantics is secondary and occasional, in Byron becomes primary. The real novelty is the use of ‘old measures’ like the Spenserian stanza, and the ottava rima of Ariosto and his followers, and other mock-heroic poets – the signifier of an alien subject. I shall point out below how Byron’s choice of metre was the result of his Italian experiences, which included a certain familiarity with the works of Alfieri, whose plays to some extent lie behind two of his verse dramas. § 201. Byron II: The anathema of Romanticism The Byrons were of Norman origin, and had arrived in England in the wake of the Conqueror. Since then, however, they had not always covered themselves in glory. Byron’s grandfather was, in Lampedusa’s words, a ‘jinx’, and brought bad luck wherever he went. He was known as ‘Captain Gale’ ever since he brought about the only naval defeat of the English fleet at the hands of the French off the coast of America. Byron’s father, a spendthrift and libertine, is said to have taken his own life in France, where he had sought refuge from his creditors. Byron inherited the title on the death of his great-uncle, who had killed a man in a duel, escaped punishment, 12

Cf. the still useful chapter on Don Juan in M. Bowra, The Romantic Imagination, London 1961, 149–73.

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and lived like a recluse in a dilapidated Gothic manor at Newstead, in the Midlands. His mother was a Scottish heiress (Catherine Gordon of Gight, related to the royal family) almost bankrupted by her husband and pushed to the verge of insanity, with disastrous consequences for her son, whom she loved deeply and excessively. Until the age of ten, Byron lived in relative poverty in Aberdeen; when he inherited the title, he moved, with his mother, to Newstead, where a corset maker tried to construct a protective casing in wood for his club foot. He suffered in silence the discomfort and shame of his deformity, but succeeded in inventing a particular way of walking very fast to hide it. His disability was offset by his other physical features: he had a fine head of auburn hair, long, tapering fingers, and was quite tall. In 1801 he was sent to Harrow, and from 1805 to 1807, to Cambridge, where, solitary and saturnine as he was, he formed friendships with exuberant companions who helped him to overcome his introversion. He had a brief affair with one Mary Chaworth, a rich, betrothed heiress, but, at the same time, had his first homosexual experience with a certain Edleston, who happened to be consumptive;13 his incestuous relationship with his half-sister, Augusta, has already been mentioned.14 In the spring of 1809, he threw a party in the newly restored Newstead Abbey, during which he drank burgundy from a skull (a foretaste of future diableries). His first poetic works consist of a collection of poems, printed privately and immediately withdrawn from circulation, and in a re-edition of the same material, substantially revised, with the addition of fresh verses, published under the title of Hours of Idleness (1807). 2. Hours of Idleness is a hotchpotch of all sorts of poetry – elegiac, sentimental, satirical, but also erotic and sexually allusive. The volume is like a

13

This fair-haired chorister was the object of Byron’s passionate, albeit chaste, love. A poem dedicated to him in 1811 was entitled ‘To Thirza’, to hide the real identity of the person addressed. 14 Orwell, indulgent in OCE, vol. I, 119–21, refused to join in the ‘chorus of disapproval’ (while he thought Byron’s treatment of his wife, Annabella, ‘abominable’) because Augusta was ‘only’ Byron’s half-sister, and they had grown up far apart. He added that in certain societies, like that of Ancient Greece, the union of a male with a non-uterine sister was an accepted practice.

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kaleidoscope: turning the pages, one sees ‘romantic’ landscapes (complete with ruined castles), graveyard elegies, dedicated to friends loved in life and remembered in death, identified by their initials, surrounded by and interwoven with lines translated from or inspired by the poetry of Ancient Greece. Sentimental poems alternate with parodies, expressed in limping or sing-song verses, often in an outlandish mixture of English, Latin and Greek, and a scattering of billets doux which are, at the same time, facetious; add to these a number of apostrophes, greetings, invitations and epigrams, and the versatility of this first volume becomes apparent. The title itself, which has received little attention from critics, seems to me to be an early example of the ‘burlesque’ Byron. The contents of the volume belie expectations and the title already sounds like deliberately misleading self-irony and colossal understatement: these first poems are not the fruit of leisure or idleness, or the boredom of an amateur, but are, instead, though masked by Castiglionesque sprezzatura, expressions of true poetic fervour and energy, which the author pretends to contain and restrain. As if this were not enough, he makes great show of his familiarity with foreign languages, both ancient and modern, and his ability to imitate the style of various poetic predecessors.15 No other diagnosis is possible, given his riposte to a hostile review published in the Edinburgh – ‘English Bards and Scotch Reviewers’ – in which Byron ferociously criticized, in a kind of poetic manifesto, the political cowardice of the first Romantics, and, sparing the conservative, anti-Romantic poets, adopted the style of Pope and the most recent of his followers, Gifford.16 So the satirist in Byron was active from the start, and ready to attack whenever the occasion presented 15

16

Among the various subjects, the emotional return, not without a touch of parody, to places that are dear in the memory, with outpourings in imitation of Wordsworth. One is a variant of Donne’s ‘The Relique’, which harps parodistically on a lady’s ribbon the poet keeps as an earnest of her love. William Gifford (1756–1826), who, in two poems (1791 and 1795), had satirized, imitating Persius, the ‘Dellacruscan’ (that is, pseudo-radical) poets and other minor playwrights. The extent of Gifford’s political conservatism is shown by the fact that he became editor of the famous journal, The Anti-Jacobin. Byron thought, wrongly, that he was the author of the negative review of Endymion that distressed Keats so much.

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itself. In this case, however, he sat on his retort for a year (1809), and the verve of the first title disappeared completely and was neutralized in later editions.17 ‘English Bards’, in the first place, declares that the literary scene at the beginning of the nineteenth century resembles the Grub Street glut that had so sickened Pope 100 years earlier. Byron was reacting in disgust against the publication, by renowned presses, of quite mediocre poets, and against the ‘occupation’ of the theatres by second and third rate plays. The poem surprises because it is the work of a twenty-year-old, and at that age it is more natural to praise novelty for its own sake; while the poet of ‘English Bards’ expresses an apocalyptic vision more in keeping with crabbed old age which, as a matter of principle, tends to praise the ‘good old days’ and damn the new. The long-gone golden age was, for Byron, that of Pope and Dryden, and, possibly, Gifford (who seemed, however, to have given all he had to offer, and was now resting). Byron rises up against the new Grub Street in his own version of the Dunciad. On the other hand, this kind of splenetic ill-temper and panic-attack recurs cyclically in time: for many late Victorians, Gissing was an embittered, apocalyptic visionary. Byron’s aesthetic is based on the belief that art should not be bought and sold as in the market-place, but should be free and independent of pecuniary constraint. To demonstrate this, he has recourse to the philistine banalization of the sublime, demonic, exotic and ‘Romantic’ folklore by Scott and Southey. He presents a splendid parade of the most renowned Romantics, immortalized and caught in brilliant couplets: Wordsworth is a poet who turns prose into verse and vice versa, in a succinct portrait that is both playful and personally offensive (the ‘Idiot’ is not the ‘boy’ in the ‘Idiot Boy’ but the poet Wordsworth, and the ‘idiocy’ in question is the poem itself ); the cardinal poetic virtue of ‘obscurity’ is mocked in the figure of Coleridge. The only Romantics to escape ‘whipping’ are Campbell, Rogers, Burns and Crabbe, because of their emotive truth and because, in their works, words correspond to thoughts and feelings in an unambiguous relationship, such as constituted the greatness of Pope and Dryden. Byron’s

17

After being re-printed four times, the poem was withdrawn, and in 1815 Byron made up with Coleridge.

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poem is a sequence of succinct portraits disfigured by brutal ad personam razor-slashes; but, ironically, after chastising Southey for his prolixity, he falls into the same trap, so that the second half of ‘English Bards’ is clearly less successful than the first. § 202. Byron III: ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’. The ‘grand tour’ of an eccentric Englishman From July 1809 to July 1811, exactly two years, Byron went on a grand tour to Portugal, Spain, Albania and Greece, accompanied by a valet and a school friend, Hobhouse. Far from travelling to widen his mind, he was – qualis pater talis filius – on the run from certain importunate creditors to whom he owed the sum of £12,000. He was forced to avoid Italy, France and Greece, at the time theatres of war. He returned to England, and went to visit his mother, only to discover she had died of apoplexy after receiving an exorbitant bill. She was buried along with a favourite teddybear – one of the first of many sudden inversions of the sublime and the ridiculous in the life and works of the poetic lord. Further proof of this see-saw tendency came, immediately after, with his maiden speech to the House of Lords in which he inveighed against the death penalty for the Midlands and Nottinghamshire mill-workers who had been found guilty of destroying the machinery that threatened to make them redundant. In Regency London, Byron strutted around like a dandy, practised all sorts of sports, and sank deeper and deeper into debt, to the tune of several thousands of pounds. Fortunately, the first two books of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage sold like hot cakes. Composed in the second year of his tour, they were published at the insistence of his friend, Dallas, in March 1812, after Byron – once again – pretended to hate them so much he wanted to burn them (the third book appeared in November 1816, and the fourth in April, 1818, when Byron had, by now, abandoned England forever). So, between the first two and the others there is a difference, not in time only, but in mood and structure. The genre of the ‘travel poem’ was quite new at the time: accounts of journeys were usually in prose, and in a neutral, impassive style; anything of the kind written in verse was usually called an ‘Excursion’, and described mountains, meadows and lakes in the wilder parts of England and Scotland, like Devon and the Lake District, and featured

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peasants and shepherds, as in Wordsworth; the only recent exception was Goldsmith’s The Traveller.18 Byron decided to fill the gap; he felt that his poem had many things in its favour: his English readership was isolated, far from contemporary Europe and the classical past; travelling was difficult, so most people were sedentary, with very few contacts with the wider world of Europe, which, consequently, would appear all the more intriguing and exciting. With great intuition, he chose, for his poem, those aspects of his European experience that were most likely to appeal to the collective imagination of his readers. He was already proving himself a master in the art of creating expectation and surprise. 2. In the first section, Byron creates a mouthpiece: he speaks, not in the first person, but in the third, through ‘Childe Harold’, to whom he attributes the gift of thoughtfulness, and a national (and supranational) consciousness of the importance of political and religious freedom. Alongside the first mask is a second, when, suspending the narration of events, Byron has the poet sing to his own accompaniment on the lyre. Only in the third book does the narrative become more regular and flowing and the mouthpiece disappears.19 In other words, Harold acts as a hypostasis that allows Byron to speak through another person, although the reader is aware of the stratagem. No orderly biography of Harold is given; from the few traits that are mentioned one would say he is identical to Byron himself: transgressive, sexually promiscuous, dissolute, but nauseated and eager to turn over a new leaf. Restlessness makes him want to leave as soon as he sets foot back on English soil; he is gripped by an ancient curse and cannot break free. The search for all that is pure and unsullied, rather than false and corrupt, is the sign of a character that wants to redeem himself. The Byronic myth is born from the love of a chaste maid whom Harold has, all too soon, sullied; he flees from the dwelling of his forebears, an old manor where superstition meets sensuality, a scenario to be taken up by Keats in ‘The Eve of St Agnes’. After his first journey, Harold tries to settle down in the society of his fellow men, but it is not to be. He longs to be on the road again, far

18 19

Two distant prose ancestors are Ascham’s Schoolmaster and Evelyn’s Diary. In the first draft the name was Buron, which belonged to Byron’s Norman forebears.

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from men who, like caged birds, vainly beat their wings but cannot fly. In Geneva, he praises the symbolic purifying quality of the lake compared with the ‘busy walks of men’ he has left. In stanza 72 of the third book, the allusion to Wordsworth becomes explicit: Byron cites the restorative communion with nature, and raises a hymn to the medicinal power of the Cantons; there is, in the air, something divine. The book ends with Harold’s arrival on the Italian border. Stanza 97, in turn, seems to look to Shelley in its unrequited yearning to be united with the forces of nature in the ecstasy of Panic fusion and fervour. In reality, the text rings false every time this mask slips, and the rebellious exile who has turned his back on England is found mouthing the most prejudiced opinions, and expressing fears and dreads that clash with previous libertarian appeals and calls to rise in the name of progress and the advance of civilization. Mixed with the appeals and apostrophes is nostalgia for bygone days. In the first two books the descriptions of a bull-fight and of the battle of Waterloo stand out discreetly in a context bristling with rhetorical questions aimed at confirming the tritest commonplaces. At the base of the Parthenon, Byron denounces the theft of the frieze by Lord Elgin, and goes on to lament the decline of Greece, echoing many other poets like Shelley, and, later, Barrett Browning, united in their indignation at the occupation of the country that first gave the world, among other things, democracy and freedom of thought. In the first scenario of the second journey – Waterloo – Napoleon is interpreted, as in Manzoni, in the light of fatal extremisms, but with a sense of respect and wonder. Digressions come and go, freely, and have an unconfessed phatic function. Sudden descents into bathos, in particular, are especially effective, as in the first book, where the lack of hygiene and cleanliness in Portugal is graphically described. Portugal is also the scenario in which Byron strikes a number of ‘populist’ chords, aimed at stirring up anti-Catholic feelings in his English readers, and justifying philistinism and prejudice; crosses suggest unpunished murders, the inhumane rules of monastic orders, and the absence of laws, or, at least, of their enforcement. The prosodic modulation, too, is a stratagem for estrangement. Songs sung by Harold are inserted into the narrative flow in the first two books, and fall completely silent only in the fourth. In the first intermezzo, Harold, standing on the deck of the ship that has just weighed anchor, takes his

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harp and intones a farewell or goodnight to the country he is leaving, no longer in Spenserian stanzas, but in ottave of six-syllable lines. The reader is led to believe that the song is purely lyrical, but instead, little by little, it becomes discordant, and then turns into a dialogue: Harold’s page, on request, gives an anti-lyrical address on the reasons for their departure, and lists the everyday negatives and downsides of the journey he is about to undertake. So it becomes clear that the structural law is the sudden change of register, or cacophony. 3. The fourth book is certainly the most enjoyable and flowing of the four, though it is also the most superficial and conventional, saved only by the above mentioned ‘stings in the tail’ and disautomatizing parentheses. In fact, there are already signs of the future Don Juan in Byron’s skill in changing the discursive register from one moment to the next, passing from a deeply moving memory to a pathetic portrait (such as the image of the dying gladiator evoked by the Coliseum), to the solemn apostrophe, or irreverent digression – analogies and parallels explained by the fact that the two poems were close in time, indeed, almost contemporaneous, and may even have been drafted at the same time. Some historical generalizations are truly awful, as are various banalizations; on the other hand, there is a refined interlacing of quotations, from the Bible to Shakespeare, Wordsworth and, above all, Shelley. The finale is a hymn to the metamorphic nature of the sea, an element that is indomitable and as free as the west wind, and therefore, quintessential to nature. The conceptual paradigm of this totally Italian book is the eternity of art as opposed to the transience of matter. Venice survives, magnificent and unique, in the works of the poets who have sung of her. Adopting a politically orthodox position, Byron points to her as a buttress against Turkish expansionism. Arquà, Ferrara and Florence give rise to rapturous rhapsodies that confirm that their glories still exist (mainly for the benefit of the English, who, after Byron, were to make a habit of criticizing the Italians for neglecting these authentic jewels). § 203. Byron IV: Oriental tales In order to preserve the integrity of Childe Harold, while, at the same time, taking note of the effect of the hiatus between the two subunits (Books 1 and 2; Books 3 and 4), I have overlooked the events of

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the intervening ‘English’ period of two years, events which were in part included in the last two books of Childe Harold. By 1812, Byron had a stock of material that he realized he could exploit to great effect; he could, he thought, capitalize on the highly successful model of the touchy young misanthropist, who was such only on the surface, as he was ready to burst into song overflowing with truly felt love, both incestuous (for Augusta) and conventionally paternal for his daughter. On the notes of a song for Ada the third book of Childe Harold opens and the fourth book ends.20 On the strength of his sudden fame Byron laid siege to Lady Caroline Lamb, who was impulsive, slightly crazy, but undoubtedly gifted. His love affairs with women, real or presumed, soon were legion. Annabella Milbanke, whom he married in 1815, was knowledgeable in the arts and sciences; she deluded herself that she might make him mend his ways, but the marriage foundered and the couple separated in 1816. Of course, when Byron left on his second European tour, he did not know that he would never see England again. In Geneva, he stayed in a villa with Shelley as his new friend; he took boat trips on the lake, and conversed fruitfully and at length with Shelley on poetry, aesthetics and theology. It has been suggested that Byron, who at the time was on the tipping point of atheism, was redirected towards humanitarian ideals by Shelley. After his stay in Switzerland, he proceeded south to Italy, passing through Milan, where he met Stendhal and stroked a curl of Lucretia Borgia’s hair which was on show in a cabinet. He reached Venice in November 1817, and stayed there until 1819, first in a modest apartment, then – bored, depressed, grey before his time, and fought over by hordes of hungry women from all social classes – he took up residence in Palazzo Mocenigo. In Venice, he immersed himself in that very decadence of which the city is an emblem the world over. However, he also went, every day, to the convent of San Lazzaro degli Armeni, where his confession was often heard by Father Paschal, the model for the Abbot of St Maurice who, in the poem of the same name, tries to restrain Manfred from embracing his tragic destiny, and committing suicide. Manfred dies anyway, punished for his unpardonable crime. Byron quickly picked up the 20 On Allegra, his daughter from Claire Clairmont, cf. § 189.2 n. 4.

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local Venetian dialect, and in the evenings would don his carnival mask and abandon himself to debauchery. 2. In the Middle East, which he had just visited, Byron had heard and filed away stories and anecdotes ready to be delivered to a market hungry for such wares, as long as they were served up with familiar, appetizing sauces. One such narrative and actantial model, derived from the more conventional Gothic novel, presents a chaste maiden, besieged by enemies and incarnations of lust, staunchly awaiting her saviour, who is usually a pirate torn between negative impulses like revenge and greed, and an unimaginable, carefully concealed devotion to said chaste maiden. The public who bought thousands of copies of these Oriental tales showed that it appreciated similar schematic constructs, so Byron quickly presented them with more, changing a few ingredients, adding different spices and scenarios, but usually ending the story with the sacrifice of the virgin and expiation of one or both enemies. At the same time, he took the opportunity to curry favour with the more right-wing among his readers by giving the tales an anti-Turkish, and correspondingly pro-Greek spin. They rivalled Scott’s poems, and were soon referred to in novels of the day as the most interesting subjects of conversation. As I mentioned above, it is not surprising that they should have provided inspiration for Romantic painters like Delacroix, and the writers of opera librettos, for they differed little from such compositions, hurried, careless, and sometimes sloppy as they are. In the first-person narrative of The Giaour21 (1813), a first, long scene is dedicated to this moody, desperate knight sitting silently on his steed on the sea-shore. His love for Leila is obstructed by Hassan, who pursues her, has her killed and her body thrown into the sea (Byron had heard that this was customary among the barbarous Turks). The Giaour kills Hassan and takes refuge in a convent, the scene of a good half of the poem, in which the dying hero confesses his sins and tells the story of his desperate, tragic love. In The Bride of Abydos (1813) a Turk keeps his daughter under lock and key since she is in love with a romantic, Promethean 21

A Turkish term of contempt meaning ‘infidel’. The poem went through three drafts, and ended up at three times the original length. Byron referred to it as ‘a snake of a poem’.

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liberator. In spite of this, the story does not have a happy ending. Selim, her lover, becomes a pirate and leads a punitive expedition against the cruel father, who has him killed. The daughter dies too, thus leaving her father a victim of undying remorse. There is a veiled allusion to the theme of incest, as Zuleika and Selim are at first thought to be brother and sister. The Corsair (1814) is Conrad, who detests the whole human race, except for women; this particular form of Romanticism will reverberate, too, in the novelist, Anthony Trollope,22 and in the music of Verdi, Berlioz and Adam. The archetypal clash is between Conrad and Seyd, a Turkish pasha, who captures the corsair and condemns him to death; Conrad escapes with the help of a favourite and, returning to his island, learns that his beloved Medora has died of sorrow, believing him to be dead. He leaves, to be seen no more. Lara (1814) apparently represents the third modulation of the basic structure. The title refers, not to a woman, as one would suppose, but to yet another enigmatic male character, whose previous oriental adventures are wrapped in mystery. Repatriated, once back on his estate he has fainting fits, nightmares, and bouts of something like epilepsy, from which he recovers with great difficulty. Underneath his rough exterior lies the usual romantic soul, proud but tender, and always passionate. Part of the mystery is one Kaled, an oriental page (first suspected then proved to be androgynous), who speaks no English, and lovingly looks after Lara, following him like a shadow. Byron, always rather rudimentary as a psychologist in these oriental tales, decides against a story of nothing but movement, cuts back on the plot, and gives us, instead, two long static portraits that delve unusually deeply into the two protagonists. The plot itself is flimsy and implausible: Ezzelin – the name is not without significance – insults him for no apparent reason, and Lara challenges him to a duel; Ezzelin sends his mentor to fight for him, and Lara comes off worse in the fight. The poem closes on Kaled at his master’s tomb, in a scene overflowing with Tasso-like pathos. In the preceding denouement, Kaled has revealed himself as a woman, so that at the end the typically Byronic gender nexus emerges strongly and clearly. The Siege of Corinth

22

Volume 6, § 55.3.

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(1816), another expression of anti-Turkish feeling, is the most agile piece of this group of poems, and stands out for a particularly cheap pathos. The centre of attention is the implosion of rancour and regrets caused by a mere spark: in the usual highly strung, fast-moving verse, the story is told of Francesca, who dies on the very night of the siege of Corinth, and Alp, the Venetian deserter who goes over to the Turks. Alp, Francesca’s former suitor, is mortally wounded by a stray cannon ball after re-living the dilemma between his undying love for her and his hatred for Venice. Francesca’s father, old Minotti, comes across as a kind of Samson: he blows up the church, with besiegers and besieged in it. Corinth is saved. 3. Thus ends the chapter on the ‘oriental tales’. Now for the poems that issued from Byron’s time spent in Switzerland and Italy. Perhaps owing to the influence of Shelley, they deal largely with the suppression of juridical and psychological freedom: evil and vindictive characters, representing tyranny, assail innocent victims. Naturally, Byron does not exactly vie with Shelley on his (Shelley’s) own pitch; he chooses not to deal with mythical heroes or even the modern equivalent: instead, he takes little-known stories, or fishes out from history books various cases of barbarity and punishments inflicted on chaste lovers, joined in some often impossible and obstructed union of true hearts. Byron, like other poets, was influenced by Italian chivalric, mock-heroic and burlesque poetry, via translations of Pulci, in The Lament of Tasso and The Prophecy of Dante. In Parisina (1816, but composed in 1812), Byron, like Browning (who may have imitated him), shows he was struck by the sadistic murder of Hugo by the duke of Ferrara, his step-father, when he discovers that his second wife, Parisina, loves the young man. Byron found the story in Gibbon, but such is the delicacy with which he tells it that it seems, rather, to be taken from a novella by Boccaccio, like Keats’s ‘Isabella’. The Prisoner of Chillon23 (1816) presents two new features: it inaugurates or repeats the key Romantic or post-Romantic motif of imprisonment as an ontological condition and

23

The prisoner in question is the Swiss patriot, Bonnivard or Bonivard, a sturdy defender of the rights of Genevans in the sixteenth century. He was imprisoned in the fortress of Chillon, on the Lake Geneva.

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the consequent yearning for freedom. It is a dramatic, or, rather, non-dramatic monologue – not mimetic, fast-moving and agitated, but a leisurely sequence of nostalgic couplets that ends in a quite mawkish, complaining nursery-rhyme style. Mazeppa (1819) tells the story of a Ukrainian knight of the same name, who, when young, falls in love with a countess, and is punished by her husband, the count, who ties him to a maddened wild horse, which takes him off on a ghostly gallop across the steppe. Mazeppa escapes the attention of a hungry crow, and finds himself in the hut of a Cossack maiden. The curtain comes down suddenly on a story that reads like a fantasy or a dream. § 204. Byron V: Disputes and dilemmas in the dramas Byron began taking an interest in the semi-dramatic, or outright dramatic genre of writing when he arrived in Switzerland and joined Shelley. The precursor is Manfred (1816–1817), which was immediately a great success and left its mark on later composers like Schumann and Tchaikovsky, not to mention the other arts. Manfred was Byron’s contribution in the famous wager of Villa Diodati, made with Shelley and Mary Shelley, with the addition of Polidori, so that, on the outside at least, it belongs to the ‘ghost story’ genre, which was the category of fiction agreed upon by the four literary wanderers on the banks of Lake Leman. The name of the protagonist was used frequently, especially by Walpole, but Byron loaded it with a quasi-onomastic significance of ‘man’ + ‘freed’; the subject itself – demonic doubles and Titanic challengers – is archetypal and cyclical. What Byron does is operate the transfer of a still bleeding wound – his incestuous love for Augusta, revived when he returned to England, and followed by his second, final flight from the ‘crime scene’ – onto the Faust archetype. Byron boasted he had never read Goethe’s Faust, but, in actual fact, ‘Monk’ Lewis had recited passages from the work, by heart, while visiting in Geneva. Manfred is a minor variation of the great myth, and Faust is its father; Byron is therefore one of the first nineteenth-century writers to have re-launched two of the great myths of western culture, Faust and Don Juan. Goethe noted with some satisfaction that Byron had imitated him, while a resuscitated Marlowe might have regretted that so little of his ‘Doctor’ had survived the 200-year journey;

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Nietzsche praised the poem because, in it, Byron had created a prototype of his Übermensch. As it stands, Manfred is uneven: some parts appear carefully crafted and convincing; others, less so, and sometimes even quite shoddy. Once again, blank verse is skilfully alternated with other metrical forms in the sections referring to the seven spirits and other minor characters. At times, therefore, it is ‘calligraphic’ and refined, with an unusual insistence on the autonomous signifier in the form of carefully chosen images which at times are eccentric and perhaps overly elaborate. So, for example, at the beginning, the chorus of the seven spirits is fresh and spontaneous, but almost immediately turns into an unnecessary and undignified squabble when the spirits declare outright that it is not in their power to grant Manfred the ‘oblivion’ he asks for. The lyricism that leads up to the passionate soliloquy is far superior to the dialogue responsible for moving the plot forward. His sister, Astarte, is a spirit who deludes Manfred, rather like any one of the shades in Inferno might move Dante on his journey through the underworld: she is, in other words, pure spirit. The only scene of the real world is the recurring image of Manfred seen, on an Alpine mountain high, by some chamois hunter, or the ineffective dialogue between the naïve life-giver and exorcizer of fear, and Manfred, as he teeters on the mountain top, tempted by thoughts of suicide. The episode is brief, but striking, and reminiscent of Shakespeare, because it banalizes and alienates Manfred’s psycho-drama and bouts of folly (here, at least, Marlowe is present). The second act is more static, owing to the two dialectical clashes – one with the Witch of the Alps, the other with the demonic double, Arimanes – which provide a brief recap of the story so far, and lead to the second evocation of Astarte. Without saying a word, she listens to a few mediocre verses proffered by a lover attempting to justify the difficulties of their relationship. In the third act, the Abbot twice arrives on the scene to exhort Manfred to repent, but the hero dies without heeding either the spirits or the Abbot, who refrains from commenting on the mysterious workings of the Heavenly Father. 2. The internal law of Byron’s compositions is synchronization: like a gambler, he plays various tables at the same time; like a juggler, he cleverly handles several clubs. Don Juan was conceived and begun before the

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closet dramas of 1821 and the following years, but was resumed and left unfinished later, as proved by the presence of elements from the dramas in the text. Don Juan is the crowning achievement of Byron’s endeavours to renew and reshape literary forms. So it is logical to deal with the dramas first. In them, Byron deals with rebellion – an ontological, political and philosophical absolute, but also a declaration of militant involvement. The plays themselves are also ‘rebellious’ in their search for new forms of expression, independent of existing models. Three separate dramatic formulas can be seen experimented with in a short space of time; their aesthetic is based on a number of transgressions of the early nineteenthcentury dramatic ‘code’: for example, he chooses Alfieri’s objectivity over a slavish imitation of Shakespeare, so that the famous heroic speeches dear to Elizabethans – Byron called them ‘rant’ – are replaced by a style as laconic as is compatible with intelligibility. Such a technique also leads to a temporary reduction of stylistic polyphony and register range, so that there are no subplots to afford dramatic release, and the overall effect is one of ‘monotony’ (in the literal sense of ‘having only one voice or tone’). A dramatic continuum is achieved through the use of single, concentrated plots, which are, however, heavy and unwieldy, with acts consisting of very few scenes to avoid fragmentation. The dominant metrical form is splendidly managed, flowing blank verse, despite the fact that, as can be seen by looking at the dates, Byron wrote his seven dramas extremely quickly and, apparently, without much forethought. 1821 was his annus mirabilis for literary production. 3. In the two Venetian plays – note the contradiction – an oligarchy limits the powers of a tyrannical doge, but uses equally tyrannical measures to preserve the freedom of its citizens. In Marino Faliero (1821) a distinguished citizen offends the wife of the doge, Faliero, who, dissatisfied by the punishment meted out to the offender, heads an unsuccessful plot to overturn the oligarchical regime. The play thus exposes the almost ontological corruption inherent in most forms of government. The Two Foscari (1821) focuses on the dilemmas facing the ruler both as a father and as a public figure. This dark, fitful play deals with the fall of another doge, forced to sign the exile order handed out to his son, who dies heartbroken, followed, shortly afterwards, by his father, who has

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been obliged to abdicate. The reader/spectator is first led to support the Venetian Council of Ten whose role it is to safeguard justice and contrast the arbitrary use of power, but soon begins to doubt the wisdom of the Council’s inflexibility, and experiences an upsurge of sympathy for the two Foscari. Between the two Venetian plays comes Sardanapalus (1821), which has much in common with the oriental tales. Sardanapalus is no pirate with an eventful past, but a mild Assyrian monarch, slightly shortsighted, given to dreaming, and therefore politically inert and tending towards minimization. The play explores the theme of the impossibility of any constructive historical action, the resigned acceptance of the defeat of humanitarian ideals, and the advisability of withdrawing completely from the world into a kind of oriental nirvana. The king’s counsellors attempt in vain to shake him from his torpor. Rebellion threatens, but Sardanapalus refrains from bloodshed and spares the rebels. When all is lost, he orders a pyre to be built, and surrenders to the flames together with his faithful slave, Myrrha. 4. After these ‘historical’ dramas, Byron turned to yet another strange, unfashionable literary form, which at first appears odd and disconcerting: he writes two parodies, or versions or re-arrangements of the medieval mystery play. In them, he sets out, not to announce and confirm the truth and usefulness of religion, but to investigate the human predicament in a post-lapsarian world, explore the meanderings of faith, and confess, with Calvin, the ineluctability of predestination. In Cain (1821) Lucifer’s devious insinuations pierce the armour of moody, gloomy Cain just as, in Milton, they conquer Eve and harass Christ. Taken by Lucifer on a cosmic journey beyond the solar system, which is also a kind of anabasis, Cain has a negative, nihilistic vision of human history in the form of a series of Cuvierian catastrophes. Heaven and Earth (1822) is a torrential paraphrase of a couple of verses from Genesis, and, owing to the surreal, oneiric rites described, bears a striking resemblance to Blake’s first prophetic poems. The third phase of Byron’s experimentalism is represented by Werner (1822, but begun in 1815, based on a German source, and set in Silesia after the Thirty Years’ War), which, precisely because it was begun so early, harks back to models already used in the oriental

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and pseudo-Gothic tales, with the gigantic Schillerian Übermensch split between romantic love and implacable military duty, in a plot which, far from being simple, is, if anything, overcrowded. Leaving aside the unfortunate title (unusual for Byron), true inspiration can be discerned in The Deformed Transformed (written in 1822, published in 1824), formally an occasional piece, a trifle based on an even more trifling English novel with a splash of Goethe’s Faust, but in reality an unclassifiable dramatic sketch with a surreal flavour that smacks of the modern or, indeed, postmodern. It is a humorous, grotesque fantasy, a crazy sarabande. The only pity is it led to nowhere, though some of its eccentricity did rub off onto Don Juan. The hunchback, Arnold, rejected and derided by his own mother, meditates on his deformity and exclusion from society (it is hard not to see an autobiographical element here). The opening phases of the play are extraordinary anticipations of the surreal and ritual theatre of a century later – Synge, Yeats, Beckett – with Arnold trying, mock-heroically, to stab himself to death, like Antony in Shakespeare, and desisting when he sees, arriving on scene (a Beckettian heath) what looks like a demon, who shows him a procession of all the most attractive human figures he might want to become, prior to proposing a pact: the devil will turn into Arnold and Arnold into Achilles. This ploy, reinforced by wonderful stanzas in various metres of Gilbertian lightness, peters out into a series of insipid attempts at humour. This decline in quality may be the reason the work, which began so well, remained unfinished. The second of the two parts that were completed presents a happy-go-lucky chronological chaos (and anyway, the time and place of the action have never been specified); the demon and ‘Achilles’ take part in the Sack of Rome in a phantasmagoria of pyrotechnics, grotesque and desecrating scenes that abound in antiCatholic attacks. 5. The Vision of Judgment, published in 1822 in the first number of the new journal, The Liberal, is a bitter, headstrong composition that practically sums up the whole of Byron’s career, in that, going back to the early works, it forms a bridge linking Beppo with Don Juan. It is also another experimental work: satirical and polemical in form – and as such paired with ‘English Bards and Scotch Reviewers’ – but using, not couplets,

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but the same ottava rima as the poem waiting in the wings. The Vision is, first and foremost, an expression of Byron’s need to attack and defame, his favourite victims being all the hypocrites, mediocrities and tricksters that bamboozle the public; he gives vent to his boundless rancour, and, at the same time, shows he is ready to respond if attacked himself. His ottava rima is a receptacle for a complex mix – argument, anecdote, digression, trivial everyday news, allusions, jokes, serious and semi-serious metadiscursive admissions – and, above all, gigantic leaps in the stylistic register. A year earlier, Southey, as Poet Laureate (he succeeded to a nonentity), had written a panegyric on the late King George III; Byron takes the title of Southey’s work, changes an indeterminate ‘A’ into a determinate ‘The’, and uses it as the label for what at the start sounds like a theological joke, with caricatures and humorous desecrations of a Heaven that is presented as deserted; no new arrivals disturb St Peter (described as a crusty old porter with a set of rusty keys), while Hell is full to overflowing. Two of Byron’s targets are Milton’s Paradise Lost and Regained. Byron concedes from the start that, politically speaking, George was not a bad king; he just tolerated massacres, and above all, did nothing to increase freedom for his peoples. Byron does not believe in a sadistic God who wants to increase the number of the damned. The middle section features the contention between Satan and the Archangel Michael for the soul of the monarch. The moderate radical, Wilkes, and the imaginary Junius are called as witnesses. Another devil arrives with Southey in tow. The Poet Laureate cuts a poor figure when he launches into a poetical peroration so full of stylistic infelicities and howlers as to disgust and antagonize the heavenly host. Ten stanzas are dedicated to the unmasking of this turncoat, adept at praising one thing one day and the opposite the next. Southey ends up by being cast into a lake, where he first sinks, but then re-emerges, because – the allusion is to an image found in Dryden and Pope – ‘all corrupted things are buoy’d like corks’.24

24 For Southey’s version, and his partial defence, cf. § 214.1.

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§ 205. Byron VI: ‘Don Juan’. Mimesis and estrangement of Donjuanism Teresa Guiccioli, née Gamba, the nineteen-year-old countess of Ravenna who became Byron’s lover in 1819, first met the poet in a Venetian salon. Byron was a friend of the Gambas, patriots from the region of Romagna, and, after the collapse of the Carbonari uprisings in 1821, went with them to Pisa, where Shelley was living at the time. Both he and Byron were being watched by the Austrian police.25 They were joined by Leigh Hunt, who brought with him a project for the new radical periodical, The Liberal. During what was practically the only slack period of Byron’s entire life, one highlight was the arrival in Pisa of a group of English visitors, among whom was Lady Blessington, who left, in her memoirs, some shrewd observations on Byron’s physical appearance and state of mind at the time. He then moved to Genoa, and lived there – alone, reclusive, unable to eat though unhealthily fat – until July 1823, when he left Italy and went to the aid of another oppressed country, Greece. The expeditionary force he headed (the Gambas were there, but not Teresa Guiccioli) disembarked on Cephalonia at the beginning of August 1823, and was welcomed with full honours in a disease-ridden, mud-filled town in the gulf. He was occupied principally in logistics and the re-organization of the army, demoralized by warring internal factions. Enforced inactivity made him restless. He died of malaria months later, in April 1824 at Missolonghi. His last male ‘flame’ was a young Greek page called Lukas: the poem he wrote on his thirtysixth birthday complains between the lines of the impossibility of this love affair. His body was taken back to England, but, not unexpectedly, was refused burial in Westminster Abbey. Byron rests in a village near Newstead, which is now a suburb of Nottingham. Don Juan was neither written nor published as the result of one continuous effort: through the years, Byron

25

The episode is brilliantly recounted by Tomasi di Lampedusa (LAM, vol. II, 64–7). Count Guiccioli – who pretended not to realize that Byron and the countess were clearly flirting, to put it mildly, continued to treat his English guest with the greatest regard, and, after 1824, proudly presented his ex-wife to the Parisian beau monde as ‘la maîtresse de Lord Byron’ (it reminds one of Joyce’s Leopold Bloom). In reality, Count Guiccioli tolerated the affair because he needed Byron to lend him money. In 1820, Pope Pius VII, a friend of the Gamba family, granted the couple a separation.

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mapped out a course of preparation for his magnum opus and even wrote, at the same time, the occasional minor work. Beppo (1818) already possessed the characteristics, ingredients and anticipations of the poem in pectore: stylistic ease, comprehensibility, colloquial language, and the appearance of something to sit back and enjoy. The texts abounds in direct addresses to the reader (both contemporary and to come), who is enlightened about Venice and her customs as against those of his mother-country. The tone is mock-pedantic: Byron takes time to explain the obvious, such as Carnival, what it is and how it is celebrated; the masks and their meanings; why it is followed by Lent, and even what a gondola looks like. Here and there we are treated to gobbets of art history. What with digressions and premises, the actual story does not get started until the twenty-first stanza of a total of about 100. When it does finally start, the reader discovers that it is unsubstantial, banal, forced, and, above all, short, and that it serves the poet as an excuse for other digressions. Byron admits that the subject is ‘low’, and one thinks immediately of Sterne’s ‘rambling’, especially when Byron damns all digressing, only to exit one divagation and enter another. In any case, he openly feigns contempt, minimizes what he is writing, and affirms he is extemporizing and putting down the first thing that comes into his head. The truth is, when the story is carried forward without interruptions it is gripping and convincing; in other words, Byron is a born raconteur who, with vivid paratactic touches, as well as a good deal of wit and humour, can hold the reader glued to the page. Naturally, the merchant, Beppo, who disappeared years before, returns dressed as a Turk (giving Byron the opportunity to voice, once again, in a barrage of coarse jokes, his anti-Turkish sentiment) and sets out to find his wife, who has a cavalier servente. A sign that the story is insipid compared with the digressions is seen in the brusque ending, which deprives the reader of the pleasure of a very comic showdown. 2. By the time he died, Byron had written sixteen cantos of Don Juan, and just managed to begin the seventeenth, between July 1818 in Venice, and the eve of his departure from Genoa for Greece in 1823. The material was published in England in three separate blocks and by three different publishers. Don Juan is, first and foremost, a remake of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which had made him famous overnight: it tells the story of another voyage in the Mediterranean by his alter ego and mouthpiece, with whom

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the author plays a game of hide and seek, at times identifying with him, at others dissociating himself from him, as he sees fit. The poem is one last poetical anamnesis. Within and behind it lies his life story, in all its drama and passion, transfigured into a playful, funny, ironic phantasmagoria. When the focus of the poem switches to England, the hypocrisy of the aristocracy and their miserable affairs are viewed through a now less ruthless lens. It must be understood that what we have here is a self-analysis: Byron sees himself in the mirror of himself as a young man, and, à la Freud, attributes great importance to the adolescent phase of human life – or, at least, his. His great invention is the framework of reference and coordination – the Don Juan myth – in which to place his story. He might even be considered the inventor and first practitioner of the ‘mythical method’, long before Joyce and Eliot. Don Juan is in fact the supreme, final proof of Byron’s independence from literary models, which, if he does follow, he rejects almost immediately and proceeds to demolish. Right from the title, he shows he intends to use the techniques of alteration and preterition. The Don Juan blueprint is modified, and the epic rule of beginning in medias res thrown out the window. The playwright, Shadwell, had been the only one of his English predecessors to have called – correctly – the hero of his own rifacimento of the story ‘Don John’;26 Byron re-christens him ‘Don Juan’. His debt can be said to be paid off in the extraordinarily pregnant first stanza, which excludes fictitious or real military leaders as the subject of the poem, and opts, instead, for Don Juan.27 The temporariness of false heroes staring out from the front pages is placed in opposition to the adjective that says it all: ‘ancient’. Don Juan is an old, more precisely an ‘ancient’ friend. Byron alludes to the ‘pantomime’, a synecdoche or antonomasia to indicate all

26 § 58. 27 I do not believe that critics have so far noted that the incipit of Byron’s poem is a parody of the beginning of Scott’s Waverley (1814). Scott, too, in the first page of the novel says that he is looking for a hero, and discards several of uncertain, ephemeral fame as soon as he has mentioned them, and falls back on the character who gives his name to the novel. In reality, Byron may have had this novel by Scott in mind both for Childe Harold and for Don Juan, since Waverley is, or becomes, a melancholy, solitary hero.

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those pantomimes thanks to which the Don Juan story was famous, because they travelled all over the world (the renowned clown, Grimaldi, acted in such a pantomime in Covent Garden). In one short line Byron sums up the dizzying story of the Don Juan tradition: the preceding ‘Donjuanism’ consists in the hero’s being ‘sent to the devil somewhat ere his time’. Byron thus summarizes and dismisses a Don Juan tradition that it would be vain to look for. One could not have expected from him another ‘pantomime’, another repetition of the usual, unchanging features, a servile obedience to the rules of plot or genre. His is no empty talk when he says, ‘I was born for opposition’ (XV, 22). Biographers and critics inform us that Byron did in fact see a performance of Shadwell’s Libertine, but did not know the versions by Tirso (should we believe it?), or Molière, or even the Italian ‘scenarios’ and libretti. In his letters there is no mention of Gluck’s ballet, or Mozart’s opera. As for the metre and the mock-heroic genre, he found inspiration elsewhere, in Italian burlesque writers like Berni, Pulci and Casti, filtered through the work of a minor English poet. He did, in fact, look to Casti’s Animali Parlanti (a kind of Animal Farm that expresses, via the animal world, a political conflict between ancien régime and republicanism). Curiously enough, this work, in six-line stanzas rather than ottava rima, had been translated into English in 1819 by the same person that had translated Orlando Furioso; but Byron did not know it. The real incentive came from John Hookham Frere and his mock-Arthurian epic (attributed to two imaginary Whistlecraft brothers), which led Byron in the direction of Pulci.28 After reading Frere’s imitation of Pulci, he began Beppo, as we have seen, and then proceeded to translate the first canto of Morgante Maggiore. Regarding the method and poetics of this work, Byron is at his most ironic, such as when he says it is a kind of game (XIV, 8), a bubble ‘just to play with, as an infant plays’, and that he is writing just ‘to make some hour less dreary’. He seemed to want to give the impression that the work lacked structure, that its morphology might change from one moment to the next, and that it was based on pure improvisation. The whole of Don Juan as we have it 28

Everything is very close in time: the work by Frere, a Greek scholar and translator of Aristophanes who died in Malta, is dated 1817; five years earlier, William Tennant had written something similar in ottava rima, with the title of Anster Fair.

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consists of six separate episodes: 1) Don Juan’s affair with Donna Julia; 2) the shipwreck; 3) the idyll with Haidée; 4) imprisonment by the Turks at Gulbeyaz’ imperial hall; 5) Don Juan becomes the favourite of Catherine of Russia; 6) Don Juan in England on a diplomatic mission. This might look very neat and tidy, but the reality of the poem is ‘a-structural’, a ‘medley’ like that found in Italian mock-heroics. In other words, the urge to digress clashes with the steely inevitability of the classic Don Juan story. The poem’s structure morphs in stanzas 54–55 of Canto XII: it was first intended to be in twelve cantos, then twenty-four; now, the poets announces the poem will extend to 100 cantos, the exact number comprising Dante’s Commedia; all the cantos written so far are preludes, overtures to what is to come. In XV, 22, the poet declares he does not know where ‘this poem […] may not run’. In a letter to Murray, the publisher, he refers to the lack of planning of the poem and his uncertainty as to the ending: ‘I had not quite fixed whether to make him end in Hell, or in an unhappy marriage, not knowing which would be the severest’. 3. Which shows that Byron already found himself faced with the variety of choices regarding the dissolution and transformation of the Don Juan story foreseen by Gregorio Marañón.29 The relationship with the Don Juan tradition does not depend, in Byron, on preterition only, though preterition is involved (it is interesting to consider how often this rhetorical figure occurs in the poem, also in the form of the preteritional word ‘etcetera’).30 But preterition tends to peter out, or be flanked by other figures. So, let us begin by asking: is there nothing of the traditional Don Juan in Byron’s version? The first thing to notice is that we are in the presence of a skilful manipulation of the plot: gone is the classic figure of the Don as drawn by Tirso and his successors. The archetype has changed: no diabolical devourer of female prey, no Faustian Übermensch, but a naïve, passive, inexperienced lad who is anything but madly promiscuous. The action of the poem lasts two years, and in this stretch of time Don Juan ‘has’ only five 29 In Don Juan. Ensayo sobre el origen de su leyenda (1940). 30 A possible incomplete and purely indicative list of preteritions in the form of ‘etcetera’ and other similar terms is the following: III, 1; V, 42; VI, 1; X, 27–8; XII, 43; XIII, 36.

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women – loved chastely, or even just acquaintances – as against the ‘mille e tre’ (one thousand and three) totted up by Leporello in Mozart’s opera, or Byron’s own, real, two hundred, and more, ‘conquests’ during his time in Venice. When he loves, his Don Juan loves sincerely; he is the only pure person in a corrupt society. The second observation to be made is that the poem is written in the form of assimilation and contamination. Byron is indebted to, and mocks, all traditions and none; he might be said to scour the literary horizon and summon up all the various epic forms, sacred as well as profane. In the final stanzas of the first canto he admits his debt to the great epic tradition of Homer, Virgil and Dante, and announces he will mix history, everyday happenings and fiction in his poetic melting pot: yet he ends up by playfully naming among his sources ‘five-act dramas and three-act operas’, and, above all, the Sevillian oral tradition according to which all ‘saw Juan’s last elopement with the devil’. The Don Juan thread is, at the very least, co-protagonistic and concurrent in the conflation of the sources; it is certainly the most visible, and is continually alluded to in the dialogic exchanges. In this regard, two opposite tendencies, or movements, or operations clash, and, clashing, establish themselves: one is subtraction, the other addition. Compared to traditional versions, Byron’s Don Juan deals with previously ignored stages of development, like the infancy, childhood and adolescence of a hero usually seen as an adult, or more adult than in Byron (in fact, mature, not to say senile). Byron describes, in a way, Juan’s ‘pre-history’, and never shows his hero older than twenty. After all, the traditional ‘catalogue arias’ refer to preceding exploits of the Don in foreign lands, including the Middle East, with Turkey being mentioned by name. So we are in a position to make a list of unrecognizable, parodic quotations.31 Byron is himself the burlador of this preceding Don Juan tradition. The links of the plot, according to Jean Rousset, for example,32

31

32

Literal, too, thus contradicting him when he denies knowing the models. Byron played around with the ‘catalogue aria’ in his letters as well (see in particular, the one dated 26.1.1819). A reference to ‘Là ci darem la mano’ is found in II, 184ff.; the subtle, denegating praise of constancy cannot be attributed to his Don Juan, so, in II, 209–10, Byron attributes it to himself in one of the many digressions that really anticipate the casuistry of Browning’s monologues, even if Don Juan ‘was no casuist’ (XII, 81). Le mythe de Don Juan, Paris 1976.

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are, in one way, set quite wide apart, owing to Byron’s mania for invasive digressions, and when they occur, they have been emptied of meaning by a ferocious burlesque parody. Seville is present in Tirso and Mozart, and the seduction of the boy Don is an ironic, inverted echo of the attempted rape of Donna Anna. Pedrillo parallels, and para-rhymes with, Sganarello and Leporello; Haidée, a pirate’s daughter, takes on the function of the various Thisbes, Charlottes and Zerlinas. In the seventh stanza of Canto VI, the poet explicitly refers to Gulbeyaz as the ‘third heroine’, no doubt bearing in mind an ideal selective catalogue of ongoing conquests. Rape and seduction are essential aspects of the modus operandi of most Don Juans, but are also associated (moderately) with the Russian troops at the siege of Ismail (VIII, 128ff.). So these, too, are elements that are displaced and inverted with respect to the traditional code. Burlesque intervenes when Juan dresses up as a woman to satisfy the desire of the repressed Sultana: the practical joke targets the sultan and the concubines of the harem (V, 77ff.). The scene shifts to London, where Don Juan ‘flirted without sin / With some of those fair creatures’ (XII, 25), and, ‘unlikely to resist’ (XIV, 60), is surrounded by three beauties who fight for his attention. Finally, we have a ‘joke within a joke’: the culminating episode of the statue and the meeting with the world of the supernatural (in the sixteenth and last completed canto), which seems to turn back towards the traditional story – or, rather, the ‘carnivalisation’ of it – when it is discovered that the ‘ghost’ in question is none other than a countess who wants to get her hands on our hero.33 4. While the first stanza of the poem affirms the principle of preterition, the second immediately contradicts it and gives a list of heroes, false ones included, of whom, the poet says, he does not wish to speak. Of the many inversions or shifts in the poem, one of the most interesting is the attribution of promiscuous Donjuanism to Don José, the father of our Don. Juan is at least traditional, in that he is a young nobleman versed in the liberal and military arts, a hidalgo who, however, born and raised within the walls of his parents’ home, soon learns to scale those of a convent: ‘fortress’ and ‘convent’ indicate the disparity between military and

33

The telling detail is ‘stood stone still’, which evokes the statue of the ‘Commendatore’; but what emerges is not a hand but an arm (XVI, 120).

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erotic heroism. Soon after the beginning – not in medias res, and certainly not, as in Mozart and others, in mediissimas res, but after the infancy of the orphaned Juan – comes the episode of the seduction and duel. But the burlesque, parodic tone deflates the love tryst, which becomes merely the whim of a dissatisfied wife saddled with a fifty-year-old husband, while the duel – caused by the discovery of a pair of shoes belonging to Juan, who is in bed at the time of the nocturnal ambush34 – turns into a hilarious shambles. Seduction, however, is not ‘forcing’, but a sweet, abandoned idyll, a drawnout game of touches and caresses. Don Alfonso is not a ‘Commendatore’ but a fool who would have been made an even greater one, had it not been for that lucky, or unlucky, break. True to the pattern of role rotation, Juan takes no initiative, while Donna Julia is the predatory seducer (with the same initials as Don Juan, note well) and Juan the seduced victim. Julia is even accompanied by no-nonsense Antonia, a kind of female Sganarelle or Leporello. Moreover, when her husband arrives with his ‘posse’, Donna Julia sings an ‘aria’ which, in its wording and repetitiveness, imitates, not so much Mozart (or only the aria of Donna Anna at the very beginning of the opera) as Beethoven’s Ah, perfido (‘ungrateful, perjured, barbarous don Alfonso’). Stanza 149, with its firework display of obscene puns, is the aria of a catalogue of denials: ‘Did not the Italian musico Cazzani […] Count Corniani, […] Were there not also Russians, English, many?’35 Donna Julia is given the delicate task of vaunting absolute purity and spotless virtue while teetering on the brink of an abyss of lust. Into which, of course, she tumbles headlong. This opening, or almost opening scene, ends with Juan’s flight, ‘favoured by the night’ (echoing the words of Da Ponte, ‘col favor della notte’), in Donna Anna’s account to Ottavio. From a geographical point of view, Juan is sent on a journey of formation that is the opposite of Tirso’s version, which has him travelling from Naples to Spain, whereas Byron sails him from Seville eastward across the Mediterranean and to Turkey. The two variants converge on a shipwreck and a fortuitous landfall,

34 Perhaps a reminiscence of Shakespeare’s Merry Wives, which turns up hundreds of times in later comedy. 35 Donna Julia calls on imaginary witnesses to vouch for her chastity, but their names suggest the very opposite.

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after which, as in Tirso and Molière, a ‘fisherwoman’ finds Juan, restores him to health, and falls in love with him. 5. In the second canto, Juan is tested, and leaves, swearing on the very virtue his prototype holds most in contempt, constancy: he vows he will be true to Donna Julia forever. Byron being Byron, it seems natural that this solemn oath should end up mixed with the vomit brought on by a bout of sea-sickness. The sea-journey releases a host of intertextual, parodic references – from the wanderings of Ulysses to Coleridge’s ‘Rime’ to name the most evident. Alone and valet-less, Juan lands on the island, and is discovered by two young women, Haidée and Zoe, her maid. Lambro, Haidée’s father, is a pirate, and, therefore, a sailor; so his daughter might well be Tirso’s or Molière’s Thisbe. Love at first sight feeds not on sighs alone but on the tasty, spicy titbits prepared by Zoe. Juan is not only true, but ‘still’, ‘motionless’, the opposite of the whirlwind of movement he is usually portrayed as being. Byron’s Juan is decidedly ‘dozy’. The lines ‘and thus they wandered forth, and hand in hand […] they turned to rest, and each clasped by an arm […] their lips clung into a kiss’, is an almost perfect paraphrase of Mozart’s duet, ‘Là ci darem la mano’. Juan and Haidée are ‘forever young’, but predestined to separate, in line with Byron’s fatalistic vision; theirs is a pre-lapsarian unison, which protects them from the evils of the world they do not know (it is hard not to think of Miranda and Ferdinand in The Tempest).36 After Haidée’s premonitory dream, their union is shattered by her father, who confronts Juan with sword and pistol. Our hero is bound and taken on board a ship, where he is put under lock and key. Haidée is at first stunned by this upturn, then she loses her mind, and, finally, dies. The ship’s destination is Constantinople, where all the 36

The Island, written in early 1823 in Genoa while he was engaged on Don Juan, tells the story of the mutineers of the Bounty, which intrigued Byron because it contains within it the dream of founding a better society in some earthly paradise. The dream is short-lived, but has shown it is capable of gripping the collective imagination since the Middle Ages and up to the present day, passing through The Tempest, Defoe and Golding amongst many others. In The Island Byron is thus strongly critical of early eighteenth-century society with its non-values: two primitive beings continue to live out their lives on the island, but, as in all utopias on a desert island, the ending is brusque and brutal. To underline the parodic intention, the captain who leads the crew to Tahiti is called Christian, like the protagonist of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

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prisoners will be sold in pairs, separated according to their sex. Juan is left over from the pairing, and so is placed with a beauty from Romagna (Countess Guiccioli …), who, of course, begins to flirt with him. He resists by thinking of his Haidée. Together with an English soldier, Juan is bought by a black eunuch, Baba, who suggests they be circumcized (an insult for any self-respecting Don Juan). Equally unseemly for him is when he is forced to dress up as a woman: he is ordered to present himself, thus garbed, to the Sultan’s lascivious consort, who needs this kind of perversion in order to achieve satisfaction. The question of whether he is able to love is pertinent: he must spurn the advances of the Sultana and, in so doing, be heaped with scorn and humiliation. With the Sultan’s arrival on the scene, we have a repetition of the irruption of Don Alfonso into Donna Julia’s bedroom while Juan hides huddled under the coverlet. Three women contend the right to sleep in the same bed as ‘Juanna’. In the middle of the night Dudù screams, and all the women rush in, only to be told that it was just a bad dream. In cantos seven and eight, the Sultan’s two prisoners act heroically in a military operation, and Juan is covered with glory when he deliberately seeks out danger in pathetic and pseudo-chivalric secondary episodes (the Muslim who sees his children die). If the first two cantos are the most memorable parts of the poem, the anti-war protest of this second couple is generally considered just as formidable because of the noble, humanitarian spirit behind it. Later, Juan is sent to St Petersburg with the news of the victory. He is accompanied by a little girl called Leila, who has been saved during the massacre. There is irresistible humour in the fact that the Donjuanism of this Don Juan should come down to the love of a child. Catherine of Russia is the fourth ‘heroine’; at the Russian court, Juan ‘became a little dissolute’, but, ‘instead of courting courts, was courted, / A thing which happens rarely.’ In London, he is received with pomp, and immediately becomes a celebrity, admired by maidens and married women, while he himself remains lost, embarrassed and squeamish. He meets the chaste Adeline Amundeville and her husband, Lord Henry, who, towards the end of summer decamp to their country house, where they give a party with a great number of guests. Here Juan finds himself in the sights of the Duchess Fitz-Fulke. Lady Adeline, who moves to stand in their way, is a distant surrogate of the mother Byron never forgot: an English ‘Donna Inez’, in other words, acting as guardian to the son, who is

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her contemporary. Adeline – in a vaguely counter-Reformation phrase – ‘gan to ponder how to save his soul’, little realizing that he has no soul to save. Salvation is imagined in the form of marriage when the possibility arises of a union between Juan and Aurora Raby, a virginal Catholic despite the oxymoronic implication of her name.37 But she does not figure ‘in the catalogue / Of Adeline’. As anticipated, the sixteenth canto is totally centred on the statue of the ‘Commendatore’, an essential feature of the myth, here, of course, parodied. Juan has withdrawn for the night, but, unable to sleep, he contemplates the moon. In his case, it is not a statue that moves but a painting hanging on the wall. A cowled friar appears. In Byron’s version, it is Juan who is ‘petrified’, ‘like […] a statue’. So here too we have again an overturning and repositioning of the classic plot, which in no way detracts from its efficacy. This first apparition is explained the following morning: the ghost is that of a ‘black friar’, who according to legend, haunts the mansion, which used to be a convent before falling into the hands of the conquerors. The second encounter takes place the following night: Don Juan again sees the ghost, and is duly terrified; then he pulls himself together and reflects that body and soul, when still united, cannot fear or succumb to something that is spirit only. He is filled with rage (another inversion: the ghost, or statue, is the ‘loser’, not the ‘winner’). Don Juan drives off the ghost, but then catches up with it, and discovers its breath is sweet, lips red and heart beating fast: it is, in truth, the duchess. This last episode, which mocks the Gothic atmospheres of the novels by Radcliffe, Walpole and Lewis, once again highlights the technique of agglomeration and conflation of Byron’s sources, as well as their parodic use. § 206. Scott* I: Range and critical fortunes of Scott’s fiction In the case of Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), the task of today’s literary historian is to react to his long mummification as the father of the European 38

37

Raby, which suggests ‘rabies’, was also the name of the pervert husband of Byron’s half-sister, Augusta.

* The Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels, ed. D. Hewitt et al., 30 vols, Edinburgh 1993–2012, based on the first editions, now supersedes the so-called ‘Magnum Opus’ in 48 vols, and successive ones. Miscellaneous Prose Works, 30 vols, Edinburgh 1834–1871;

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Poetical Works, ed. J. L. Robertson, Oxford 1904. Letters, ed. H. J. C. Grierson, 12 vols, London 1932–1937 and, integrated by J. C. Corson, 1979. Journal, ed. W. E. K. Anderson, Oxford 1972 and, rev., Edinburgh 1998. Life. J. G. Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, 7 vols, Edinburgh and London 1837–1838. H. J. C. Grierson, Sir Walter Scott, Bart., London 1938; H. Pearson, Sir Walter Scott: His Life and Personality, London 1954; E. Johnson, Sir Walter Scott: The Great Unknown, 2 vols, London 1970; J. Sutherland, The Life of Walter Scott, Oxford 1995. Criticism. J. Buchan, Sir Walter Scott, London 1932; D. Cecil, Sir Walter Scott, London 1933; E. J. Gray, Young Walter Scott, London 1937; H. J. C. Grierson et al., Sir Walter Scott Lectures, 1940–1948, Edinburgh 1950; D. Daiches, ‘Scott’s Achievement as a Novelist’, in Literary Essays, Edinburgh and London 1956, 88–121, and Sir Walter Scott and His World, London 1971; D. Davie, The Heyday of Sir Walter Scott, London 1961; G. Lukács, ‘Walter Scott’, in The Historical Novel, Eng. trans., London 1962 (1st Russian edn 1937); A. Welsh, The Hero of the Waverley Novels, New Haven, CT 1963 and, enlarged, Princeton, NJ 1992; C. O. Parsons, Witchcraft and Demonology in Scott’s Fiction, Edinburgh and London 1964; F. R. Hart, Scott’s Novels: The Plotting of Historic Survival, Charlottesville, VA 1966; J. Lauber, Sir Walter Scott, New York 1966; Walter Scott, ed. D. D. Devlin, London 1968; A. O. J. Cockshut, The Achievement of Walter Scott, London 1969; Scott’s Mind and Art, ed. A. N. Jeffares, Edinburgh 1969; R. C. Gordon, Under Which King? A Study of the Scottish Waverley Novels, Edinburgh 1969; CRHE, ed. J. O. Hayden, London 1970; M. McLaren, Sir Walter Scott: The Man and Patriot, London 1970; R. Mayhead, Walter Scott, London 1973; D. Brown, Walter Scott and the Historical Imagination, London 1979; A. N. Wilson, The Laird of Abbotsford: A View of Sir Walter Scott, Oxford 1980, London 2002; J. Anderson, Sir Walter Scott and History, Edinburgh 1981; G. McMaster, Scott and Society, Cambridge 1981; T. Crawford, Scott, Edinburgh 1982; J. Millgate, Walter Scott: The Making of a Novelist, Toronto 1984; J. Wilt, Secret Leaves: The Novels of Walter Scott, Chicago, IL 1985; N. M. Goslee, Scott the Rhymer, Lexington, KY 1988; J. Kerr, Fiction against History: Scott as a Storyteller, Cambridge 1989; I. Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels, Ithaca, NY 1991; F. Robertson, Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic, and the Authorities of Fiction, Oxford 1994, also editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Sir Walter Scott, Edinburgh 2012; K. Jones, Literary Memory: Scott’s Waverley Novels and the Psychology of Narrative, Lewisburg, PA 2003; M. Pittock, The Reception of Sir Walter Scott in Europe, London 2006; A. Bautz, Reception of Jane Austen and Walter Scott: A Comparative Longitudinal Study, London 2007; I. Duncan, Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh, Princeton, NJ 2007; A. Lincoln, Walter Scott and Modernity, Edinburgh 2007; K. Stuart, Scott-Land: The Man Who Invented a Nation, Edinburgh 2010.

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historical novel,1 and assess his contribution to English and continental literature: above all, the aesthetic specific weight of his novels, and how many of them call for an analysis which is not only flowing and contained, but also individual and detailed. It is no coincidence that the word ‘achievement’ – in the sense of what Scott really means and represents – recurs so often in the titles of books and articles about him. No other writer of any importance has been so violently removed from the altar of idolatry and hurled into the dust of oblivion. Acclaimed in his day as a ‘star’, supplier on demand of librettos for various composers from Rossini to Donizetti, he was avidly read by children in England and America, but then, almost overnight, he became one of the many authors who underwent a rapid fall in popularity, compounded by the ostracism of academic criticism and other professional writers. Coleridge, his first penetrating, though erratic critic, called his poems and novels a huge collection of stereotypes. Carlyle quipped: Scott’s career consisted ‘in writing impromptu novels to buy farms with’, adding that he lacked all Romantic inspiration and was too fond of money. There is certainly some truth in the affirmation that, in sixteen years and thirty or so novels, no change is perceptible in style or content, and that he repeated ad infinitum the same old subject and the same old character types. Scott became part of tradition in spite of writers like Bulwer Lytton and Stevenson, who were clearly influenced by him, disclaiming having been inspired by him. On the other side of the Channel, Taine, only thirty years after Scott’s death, was remarking on how fake his historical settings were, and how it was all a great pageant.2 The final blow to his reputation was delivered by the Modernists, scandalized by the fact that Scott had no sophisticated aesthetics of the narrative art. He was tut-tutted at by Forster, and ignored or cold-shouldered by Lawrence and Orwell. The only exception was Virginia Woolf, herself a novelist of both the fleeting moment and the longer period, and, in Orlando and The Years, a historical one. The important work of rehabilitation at the hands of Lukács in The Historical Novel (I shall come to him shortly) was, for 1 2

On the putative precedence of John Galt cf. § 167.1. Taine’s damning discussion concentrates its fire on Scott’s superficial version of the Middle Ages, so different from the merrily bawdy one of Rabelais.

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many years, largely unknown: written in Russian in 1937, it was translated into the only slightly more accessible German in the late 1950s. Essentially melodramatic as they are, Scott’s novels corresponded to a number of preexisting historical patterns. Those critics who underline how Romanticism tapers off into the Biedermeier see Scott as an important part of this process. One such is Praz, who compares him to the de-heroicized art of contemporary English and Dutch painters.3 In Italy, not so many years ago, Tomasi di Lampedusa looked down his nose at Scott’s habit of dedicating the first hundred pages of every novel to a scrupulous description of the physical appearance of his characters, or the architecture of castles.4 Recently, however, there has been a revival of interest in Scott: academic criticism, putting aside all pre-conceptual hostility, has reinstated him among the writers to be studied. He can now be assessed in a fair, equable trial, at the end of which one can expect a verdict based both on his role in the development of the nineteenth-century novel, and on other, more intrinsic parameters. However, it is not to be denied that Scott’s novels are slow moving, and too often side-tracked into Scottish-flag-waving, ‘antiquarianism’ and folk-mania. So, the pace is anything but fast, breathless or exciting. It is often considered a fault that so many of them should have been abridged for children, as if this were an infallible sign of inferior quality (the shortened versions began to appear in the second half of the nineteenth century). In Scott’s case, it must be conceded that abridgement is not always inadvisable or damaging. Not only are Scott’s novels longer than necessary: they have little narrative structure, and often consist of a series of separate, though occasionally effective episodes. In the wealth of 3 4

For a detailed (and often criticized) comparison between Scott and the painter, Wilkie, see PHE, 54–64. LAM, vol. II, 100–1. The chapter on Scott in Emilio Cecchi’s I grandi romantici inglesi, for example, is a string of vitriolic and unjustifiably offensive considerations. Benedetto Croce was only slightly more benevolent. Scott was incompatible with the poetic climate of ‘fragmentism’ and the critical movement represented by the journal La Voce. The first significant study of Scott’s reception in Italy (literature, music and painting) is by L. Fassò, Saggio di ricerche intorno alla fortuna di Walter Scott in Italia, Torino 1906. A useful synthesis is found in PSL, 459–60, and a broader survey in F. Ruggieri Punzo, Walter Scott in Italia: 1821–1971, Bari 1975.

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‘incidents’ he has been compared to Shakespeare – though he obviously lacks his psychological insight – and to Dickens, for his kaleidoscopic abundance of funny or grotesque historical characters. Scott’s novels might be said to be ‘unexportable’ because they so often have a Scottish subject and setting, which may have delighted and intrigued the early nineteenthcentury British public, but probably are less appealing to a non-Scottish, common reader of the third millennium. The latter would no doubt skip the streams of Lowland Scots – perhaps after reading and appreciating a few of them – which are a permanent feature of the novels that do little for the action itself. And yet, it is largely the question of language that has shifted the balance of judgement on Scott. Accused of making his historical characters speak in a stilted, unnatural manner, and of using, outside dialogue, an old-fashioned, magniloquent descriptive style full of Latinisms, Scott is a classic example of the co-existence in the Scotland of his day of two widely different languages, one of which – English – had to be learnt as a foreign tongue, translated from the native Gaelic. He confessed, ‘We handle English, as a person who cannot fence handles a sword; continually afraid of hurting themselves with it […] or making some awkward motion that shall betray our ignorance’.5 Hence his often exaggerated pursuit of correctness and stylistic regularity. In reality, Scott legitimizes Scottish dialect, establishes it as a literary language, and turns it into an expression of ‘Scottishness’ itself, whereas until now it had been used for comic purposes and light relief. He prepares the way for later regional novelists like Dickens, Hardy and Lawrence. He even anticipates, in the mixture of stylistic, linguistic and pronunciation registers, the ‘banquets of languages’ of which the reader is invited to partake in Joyce’s novels. 2. Scott is to be credited with transforming the novel into an ‘adult genre’, free forever from the ostracism of snooty literary reviews, which looked down on it as something too ‘popular’ to be taken seriously. From now on, the novel, far from being derided and scoffed at by highbrow critics, would be accepted as an equal among other literary forms that might boast a better pedigree. Scott is the first ‘professional’ novelist: he writes not only

5

Quoted in Lauber 1966, 128.

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because he is ‘inspired’ but because he wants, or needs to earn money.6 Even at first glance, his work stands out on the early nineteenth-century scene for its sheer size: no other writer before him had had such motivation, fantasy and creative energy – or had received such a favourable reaction from the public, which gave him the wherewithal to continue writing. He inaugurated the three-volume novel (later to become the Victorian three-decker), the individual volumes of which were usually re-printed immediately at a more affordable price, and distributed by the newly formed circulating libraries. The year of Scott’s death is symbolic – 1832, the year that is often seen to mark the official demise of English Romanticism and the beginning of Victorianism, as well as being more or less the time when Dickens began writing. In Scott, poetry and the novel were not antithetical, but interactive, in that he began as a narrator in verse. He is usually considered as being linked to other English historical novelists like Bulwer Lytton and Ainsworth, whereas he is, in all senses, closer to the great, prolific Victorians.7 In other words, it is hard to point to any other major writer in the whole of English literature who has written more in any one genre. Only two names come to mind in this regard: Shakespeare and Dickens;8 plus, possibly, Trollope. Dickens, Thackeray and Trollope all wrote historical novels, though most of their work has a contemporary setting. In Scott there are elements of Dickens’s ventriloquism, with a touch of early sensationalism, and a great mix of the pathetic, comic and tragic, not to mention an

6

7

8

Scott was quick to learn the secret of success: ‘Get a good name and you may write trash. Get a bad one and you may write like Homer, without pleasing a single reader’ (quoted in Lauber 1966, 37). In his numerous writings on Scott, Praz draws suggestive comparisons with the painter, Turner. In an attempt to reduce Scott to the role of narrator of ‘the decline of gentrified society’, Lukács pointed to Fenimore Cooper as his only heir in English. As I indicated above, Scott’s imitators played down his influence, even disguising obvious onomastic similarities. Some of the characters whose names recur, sometimes slightly modified, in later English novels are: Bertram (Trollope), Earnscliff (Emily Brontë), Murdockson (Dickens), Latimer (George Eliot). Other Elizabethans have produced more single works than Shakespeare, Dickens or Scott. Several twentieth-century novelists have exceeded this number, though their novels are generally shorter.

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arrière gout of the Gothic. Scott’s fictional universe is more compact and interconnected even than that of Dickens, which, although anchored to several arcane structural symbols, is superficially more untidy and dispersive. He wrote more novels in series, though not serial ones,9 and novels, which, obeying some internal, unimposed law, are all the same length – about half that of Dickens’s ‘big’ stories. What is missing to make him a ‘giant’ of the novel is above all the meticulously organized, multifocal plot that runs like clockwork in Dickens. Scott, moreover, has in common with Dickens the gift of humour, though not the weapon of satire. His novels are not as artless and technically deficient as is often thought: he may be no Sterne, but his work is full of unusual twists and turns that denote an intense, though intermittent, attention to form. Most of his novels are preceded by one or two prefaces; then, in the text itself, he inserts footnotes on the historical sources of his characters, or on places and events mentioned; asterisks are used to refer the reader to extensive end-notes. He doubles as an earnest, rather pedantic commentator on the author and the novel being written. The ‘author’ in question is a creator of fiction, but in his case invention is always based soundly on historical bedrock: he is, above all, a historian of Scotland and Scottish traditions, and, as such, is at home with all these bibliographical and historical accessories that the ordinary reader would willingly do without. Armed with encyclopaedic erudition, he makes great show of his knowledge of the classics. Consequently, he is one of the great epigraphists in the narrative world, and lurks behind or within many of the pedants that appear in his plots, often gently teased by the author himself. 3. Scott’s brand of Romanticism was that made popular in Europe by the German Storm-and-Stress writers, while, in England, it was preceded by a wave of enthusiasm for folk ballads such as were collected by Bishop Percy and published as Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. Scott himself, at the age of thirty, had edited and, in some cases, re-written, ballads he 9

In fact, the chapters of the various novels were sent to the printer’s as soon as they were finished, with no possibility of revision, just as in the case of Dickens, whose novels had to be rushed to print in order to satisfy the hungry Victorian reading public. Scott is also thought to be the first author of historical short stories (cf. the three discussed in § 211.7).

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had heard at first hand among the peasantry of Scotland. The medieval settings of his early poetry reappear in Ivanhoe and some later novels; but the Scottish novels, too, which have nothing to do with the Middle Ages, are an attempt to revitalize, by artificial means, the medieval code of chivalry. The Jacobite clans of the Highlands were, for Scott, a venerable anachronism, surviving witnesses and custodians of a long-gone, utopian code of conduct, archaic rules of behaviour and feudal ties. Herein lay the attraction for Scott of the Highland clans. This same medievalism will, not so much survive in the later nineteenth century, as put down new roots in the Oxford Movement, in Newman, Ruskin and Hopkins. Scott has much to do with the essentially correct historical view of medievalism as a cultural force that reverberates in England right up to the end of the eighteenth century, with the exception of a 100-year gap after 1669 – which, however, hardly affected Scotland in spite of the so-called ‘Scottish Enlightenment’. Referring to Scott, one might well repeat Stephen Dedalus’s aphorism, that history is a nightmare from which one tries to wake. Scott handles history objectively, putting it in perspective, so the Joycean idea of effort fits; but Scott can think and write only as a historian. The limit of the typical Scott novel is that the story is difficult to digest – albeit well told – and that he always seems to contradict the promise contained in the affirmation in Old Mortality: ‘It is not our intention to detail at length incidents which may be found in the history of the period’. The frequent digressions and flashbacks which make the novels heavy-going owe their existence to Scott’s irrepressible urge to preserve and attest through documentary evidence the image of Scotland as it was and has been, in her customs, traditions and usages. Scott is fundamentally … a Scot, and his main concern is to show his fellow-Scots in the best possible light. His essentially agonistic view of history stems from an empiric reflection on the period stretching from the beginning of the sixteenth century – or perhaps, 1640, when the Civil War started – to 1745, a period of religious discord whose effects were still being felt when Scott was engaged on his novels. He saw, from his study of history, that since the Reformation, and because of the Reformation, Scotland had lived through a series of traumatic metamorphoses: first, Protestants against Catholics, then Calvinist and Presbyterian Covenanters against royalist Tories, then, in the eighteenth century, Hanoverians against

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Jacobites – all deriving from the first of the conflicts listed. Scott’s response and proposal is mediation. Equidistance, and, possibly, irresolvable hesitation is perhaps the key to understanding Scott’s representation of the cyclical conflicts of English history: he was no Catholic, but he respects the Jacobites and supports them, although with a touch of humour. As soon as he has voiced his appreciation of the Jacobites, he steps back and gives the Covenanters – and the Hanoverians, and the government forces, and even that Calvinist branch known as the Cameronians – their due. In other words, à la Bakhtin, he gives the faculty of speech to both sides and weighs up the pros and cons of each with objectivity and fairness. It is clear that he is emotionally and rationally split between nostalgia for an independent Scotland, and the acceptance of the historical ‘inevitability’ of the Union: the Jacobite resistance was anachronistic and destined to succumb to the process of national modernization. Novel after novel, Scott piles up allegories of a happy union resulting from the fusion of once warring interests: Saxons merge with Normans, and, later, Jacobites with Hanoverians. A similar allegory is conveyed by a situation found often in the early novels, but only intermittently in the later ones, that of a passive English hero who retrospectively examines the unfolding of Scottish history. The very language used by Scott reflects a compromise and the need for equidistance: descriptions and captions are in English, while the dialogues are in Lowland Scots, purely for the benefit of local readers, given that his wider audience was English. 4. A milestone in Scott criticism is, in my opinion, the tightly argued, though at times verbose, chapter in Lukács’s The Historical Novel, which says just about everything there is to say on the subject, and with an enthusiasm that might appear excessive in a Marxist critic who does not deny the fact that Scott was a conservative, had not read Hegel, and was, in the field of philosophy, an absolute beginner. Scott, however, had a sense of history; indeed, he possessed, unbeknown to himself, a new, almost Marxist sense of history, seen not as a list of the deeds of superhuman men, but as movements of the masses. So, Scott pushes heroes to one side and brings the people centre stage. To use Lukács’s most popular formula, he reflects history without heroicizing and without sublimating. Consequently, Lukács applauds the way Scott handles the story of Jeanie Deans in The Heart of

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Midlothian, and the episode of the worker who carries out a courageous action and then fades back into everyday life. Scott is often praised for his ability to recreate the sounds, smells and colours of the past. Next to the insipid, passive or ‘average’ hero identified by Lukács, other ‘types’ have been picked out by later critics: the ‘dark’ hero – primitive, wild and Romantic; and the intriguing female as represented by Flora Mac-Ivor or Diana Vernon, in some other way rendered innocuous and deprived of their capacity to destroy. Scott never ventures into the quicksands of sexual desire, and appears terrorized by the very idea of writing something indiscreet; psychological critics put this down to some youthful unrequited love (his French wife, Charlotte Charpentier, is virtually absent from her husband’s biography and fiction). It must be admitted that, had Scott attempted to enter this ‘forbidden territory’, it might have cost him the support of his more prudish fans, and that the only time he did so, he met with the objections of his publisher.10 § 207. Scott II: The poetry As always happens, before putting pen to paper, a novelist has to observe life, and build up a store of characters, situations, episodes, landscapes, anecdotes and legends. This is precisely what Scott did as he travelled the length and breadth of Scotland and in his frequent visits to the Highlands, from which he garnered an immense harvest of material to be added to his already formidable knowledge of the history of local traditions. He was the son of a lawyer (whose own father was a Border sheep farmer, while Scott’s maternal grandfather was a professor of medicine), and started off helping his father in his legal practice. Like Byron, he walked with a limp, in his case, caused by infantile paralysis. He was an avid reader of English romance literature, as well as of Ariosto and Cervantes, and, when still a boy, would astound his playmates by improvising stories of knights errant. He had actually met one of the last Jacobite survivors of the battle of Culloden. He began his literary career with translations of Bürger and Goethe, and, in 1802–1803, he published, under the title of Minstrelsy

10

§ 211.6, with reference to St Ronan’s Well.

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of the Scottish Border, a collection of old Scottish ballads (some of them revised and ‘improved’ with the help of Hogg and Leyden), in three volumes, with a scholarly array of notes, introductions and appendices. This was followed by a number of original epic and lyrical poems, on exotic and adventurous subjects, with a sprinkling of archaisms. These poems already have the makings of novels, and contain many of the ingredients used later by Scott in his prose: his white-hot imagination brings forth the wildest of adventures, and keeps the reader on his toes with sudden twists and turns of the plot, with generous helpings of ghosts, spells, revealed identities, characters believed dead who reappear, and young girls picking their daisy-petals and fearfully reciting ‘he loves me, he loves me not’. Scott’s habitual aversion to the erotic here is suspended, and the inserted songs are famous, and much loved by English readers. The Lay of the Last Minstrel11 (1805) establishes a pattern of Gothic-like plots and devices that will recur throughout his other works in various guises: in the formally complex plot, the daughter of a widowed lady falls in love with the lord who has killed her mother’s husband. The lady not only forbids her daughter to marry the assassin, but orders a retainer of hers to bring her a magic book from the tomb of the wizard, Michael Scott, which will help her to wreak her vengeance. The mission of revenge is foiled by the intervention of a goblin. The daughter marries her lover when the future son-in-law gives the lady back her infant son, who has been kidnapped. During the wedding ceremony, the ghost of the wizard, Michael Scott, appears and claims the goblin as one of his servants. Marmion (1808) overflows with various expedients from the typical melodramatic repertoire. The eponymous, and in many ways, fascinating villain of the piece (the inspiration for many of Byron’s dark, Satanic figures), kidnaps a nun with whom he has fallen in love, but then abandons her, and goes off to fight a duel with his rival for the love of another woman, Clara, who, however, spurns his advances. Marmion has also unjustly defamed his rival. Particularly striking is the figure of the nun walled in while still alive, with the ironical name of Constance, for 11

Its prosody was imitated from or influenced by that of Christabel: since Coleridge’s poem was not to be published for another ten years, Scott’s was considered an absolute novelty.

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having fled the convent after clearing Clara’s lover of all the accusations brought against him. Destiny awaits Marmion at the battle of Flodden, where he dies, giving expression, in now famous lines, to repentance, which comes, alas for him, too late. The Lady of the Lake12 (1810) differs from the others in that its far-from-banal plot is distinguished by a taste for the fantastic similar to that found in Shakespeare’s comedies. A mysterious knight loves Ellen, the daughter of the chieftain of a rebellious clan holed up in a castle by the side of Lake Katrine. Ellen rejects him, preferring a typical Scott hero, loyal to the king though sympathizing with the rebels. The knight is magnanimous, however, and gives her a ring which, he tells her, will enable her to obtain whatever she desires from the king. When the rebel clan is doomed, Ellen appeals to the king – rather like Jeanie Deans in The Heart of Midlothian –13 and begs that her father be pardoned. Her wish is granted, and she discovers that the mysterious knight was no other than the king, James V, in disguise. As well as the royal pardon for her father, she receives the king’s permission to marry the nobleman she loves; a political crisis is avoided by a temporary reconciliation between the crown and the opposition. The Bridal of Triermain (1813) presents an unwieldy three-tiered plot: into a contemporary framework, Scott inserts the chivalric adventure of Sir Roland De Vaux, and, within this, in turn, he places the story of the enchantress, Guendolen, and the spell she casts on King Arthur. Sir Roland sends a page to a wise man to interpret his dream of a chaste, angelic maiden. The old man tells the story of how King Arthur, on his travels round the world, was bewitched by Guendolen. The maiden that Sir Roland must awaken from the spell is Gynith, the daughter of Arthur and Guendolen. Arthur’s journey ends before a hill crowned by turrets; after sounding his horn repeatedly to announce his arrival, Arthur is welcomed into the castle by a bevy of beautiful girls who ensnare him with their spells. The moral of Scott’s story is summed up in the couplet: ‘Much force have mortal charms to stay / Our peace in Virtue’s toilsome 12 13

La donna del lago is the title of the Italian libretto of Rossini’s opera, which is quite close to Scott’s novel. § 209.2. See, also, the motif of the rings in Shakespeare, especially in All’s Well That Ends Well.

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way’. The queen of the castle is, in fact, a witch who leads Christian knights astray. She promptly seduces Arthur, whose sin may only be expiated by another unblemished knight – in this case, Sir Roland. In his search for the daughter born from the union of the enchantress Guendolen and Arthur, the knight ventures into sinister, ghostly lands, spurred on by the certainty of fame and honour at the end of his quest. As in the case of Ulysses with the Sirens, he manages to escape the snares of the girls in the castle, free Arthur’s daughter from the spell (Wagner comes to mind here), and, once she has been restored to purity, marry her.14 Scott was never again to steer so close to the parable of the necessary mortification of the flesh and resistance to the ‘snares […] / Spread by Pleasure, Wealth and Pride’. Rokeby, published the same year, shows the disintegration of the chivalric model into a mere catalogue of abstruse and gratuitous adventures. Scott’s poems became an instant success, especially in terms of sales. The arrival on the scene of Byron’s Childe Harold, however, was fatal for them. Less popular and qualitatively inferior to them are three plays.15 The tireless Scott had been, and remained, an all-round man of letters: he edited the works of Dryden16 and of Swift, and supported the new Quarterly Review. § 208. Scott III: The Scottish historical novels I. The founding trilogy It is not easy to describe the organization of Scott’s prose fiction, which is, all together, a veritable Hydra (with twenty-eight heads). The usual term, ‘the Waverley novels’, is inappropriate and misleading, and more of a conventional mnemonic and editorial tag than an accurate description, given that the novels were not conceived as a series, and because the references to Scotland and Scottish history are not uniform and continuous. They can be divided and classified according to literary merit, geography (Scotland, England, France, elsewhere), or historical period (seventeenth

14 15 16

The influence of Spenser here is obvious; Scott’s poem, in turn, is the main source for Browning’s Childe Roland to the Tower Came (see my ‘Nel labirinto delle isotopie: “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” di Browning’, in IDM, 37–51). As a prose-writer and literary critic, Scott wrote Lives of the Novelists (1821–1824), a kind of pendant to Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets. § 47 bibliography.

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century, eighteenth century, or Scott’s own day). The most popular, best known and loved are, for obvious reasons, the ‘Scottish’ novels, the plots of which are undoubtedly coordinated, not based on a precise historical chronology of events, but rather on the unity of vision of the history of Scotland. It has often been pointed out that the lack of chronological order is countered by the presence of an emotional order. Scott is a writer who begins his career with a masterpiece, instead of working his way upwards through an apprenticeship of ever-improving achievements. He maintains the same level of excellence for a few years after 1814, then seems to falter somewhat, then again recovers and indeed shows signs of innovation. The final phase is marked by a decided falling off. In 1826 his publisher and partner, Ballantyne, went bankrupt, and Scott found himself submerged in debt, which he set about paying off to the last penny with the income from his literary activity. He had gone to great expense to become a ‘laird’, the wealthy landowner of an estate he called Abbotsford, on the banks of the Tweed – a gesture that cannot but bring to mind the analogous enterprises of Beckford and Walpole: like them, he wanted to recreate and live in some world of the past. He put off compiling a definitive edition of his works, revised and corrected, with a view to increasing his profits on sales.17 His first novel, Waverley (1814, published anonymously to conceal the fact that the author was a magistrate),18 is a fictional version of the Jacobite uprising of 1745. It seemed the work of an experienced writer, and was, indeed, the revised form of an original text drafted in 1805. The following Guy Mannering (1815) and The Antiquary (1816) complete a trilogy that embraces three periods. The only reservation as to the downward movement of Scott’s trajectory is that, in my opinion, Waverley should be downgraded with respect to Guy Mannering and The Old Mortality, too. This trilogy 17 18

Praz brilliantly summarizes Scott’s travels (Malta in 1831 and 1832, followed, on the way back, by Italy, Austria and Germany) in ‘L’ultima fatica di Walter Scott’ (SSI, vol. II, 201–6). The author’s identity – already common knowledge anyway – was officially revealed in 1827. Before this, all the novels had been announced as being ‘by the author of Waverley’ or ‘the Great Unknown’, a kind of nom de plume that became ironically appropriate in the light of his subsequent decline in notoriety.

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introduced the new prototype of the ‘average hero’, who is usually rewarded at the end of the novel by the discovery of his ‘true identity’, accompanied by an inheritance. An alternative feature of these novels is the pattern of two political rivals (sometimes, less often, on the same political side) in love with the same woman, who is attracted to the one belonging to the opposite political faction. Technique is Scott’s weak point: he is not concerned with structural unity, chooses to tack together a ragbag of separate episodes, and, above all, knows nothing of the rich potential of the point of view. Of course, he was aware of the need to curb the predominance of the omniscient narrator, and, from a certain point onwards, the novels are presented as the work of a schoolmaster, one Jedediah Cleishbotham. His most daring technical innovation is the parodic use of letters and diaries in the later Redgauntlet. 2. Waverley (1814) reads as if Sterne and Smollett had not existed, and begins at the beginning – the main character’s youth – all rather mechanically, with little or no rhythmic invention and intention. Fielding would seem to be the closest model, with the numerous direct addresses to the ‘dear reader’. Anything approaching a multifocal vision is out of the question. It is, however, true that the structural flimsiness is compensated for by a number of dyads – the two opposing factions facing up to each other, the two Jacobites that intervene, and, above all, the two icons of womanhood. This structural principle will be the basis of most of Scott’s later novels. From now on, Scott writes in two languages, or, rather, two different registers: the rich vernacular of the lowly, and the classical, learned English used whenever the author himself takes the stand. The linguistic dyad shows up clearly in the description of the people that live on the Baron of Bradwardine’s estate, as witnessed by Waverley as soon as he arrives. The episode is a fine display of pre-Dickensian virtuosity, with vivid sketches of the local imbibers, lots of humour, and a great deal of colour in the form of dialogue crackling with pithy dialect terms. As a compromise, Scott uses a mixture of English and Scots in dialogues and descriptions, the Scots being translated with the formula ‘or … etc.’, or by means of footnotes, as if it were some kind of erudite commentary. The result is often a linguistic hotchpotch. The life of the Mac-Ivor clan, at the heart of the Stuart resistance, is characterized by wild, Rabelaisian feasts in the course of which

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whole roasted lambs are torn apart and washed down with whisky by the pint. The only one to abstain is the finicky Waverley. A first novel is usually ninety-nine per cent autobiographical, and this is no exception. Edward Waverley is based on Scott as a young man – intuitive, but lazy, he lives with his uncle and spends his time immersed in books; he joins the king’s army and reaches the rank of captain; he is sent to Scotland, where he visits his uncle’s old friend, the Baron of Bradwardine. The Baron’s daughter, Rose, is respectful, intelligent, motherless and a lover of books; she is a trifle insipid, and inspires no feeling of desire in the, as yet retiring Waverley. During his next visit to the Mac-Ivors, Waverley is wounded in the course of a deer hunt, and is nursed back to health by Flora, sister of the clan chieftain, Fergus, and feels the stirrings of something more than mere friendship. Halfway through the novel, the static plot is given a good shaking by a number of events that add a pleasantly picaresque flavour: Waverley is dismissed from the army when his father changes sides in the political contest; Flora refuses to marry him because she could never give to any husband even a small part of the energy and emotion she has consecrated to the Jacobite cause; Baron Bradwardine takes to his heels, pursued by the government forces. Particularly effective, thanks to the fast-moving pace, is the scene of the presentation of the Pretender at Holyrood, where Waverley – after being arrested, tried, convicted of high treason, taken to Stirling in chains, and subsequently freed – is officially entrusted with his mission by the smooth-talking prince, and mumbles excuses and objections which are effortlessly swept to one side. The last part of the novel is marred by excessively detailed descriptions of incidental happenings and in the transcription of lengthy speeches. Overall, the movement is oscillating, with some episodes really well crafted, like, for example, the destruction of Tully-Veolan, the ancient dwelling of the Bradwardines. Just before the end, the Baron is given one final opportunity to show off his eccentricity. Waverley marries his daughter, while Mac-Ivor is sentenced to death, and his fascinating sister, Flora, takes refuge in a Catholic convent. In the meantime, Waverley has grown politically. In the course of the conflict he has discovered he sympathizes with the Jacobite cause, and consequently feels guilty for this ‘treason’. The various phases of the battle of Preston in December 1745 are seen and narrated in the background. Waverley takes no

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part in it, since he is saved during the night by a peasant, and, in disguise, escapes being rounded up with the other prisoners. In the de rigueur parts dedicated to scenes of fighting, Scott seems to slip into the mock-heroic mode: the skirmishes are innocuous and cause only surface wounds, but never actual death. Whimsically elliptical, he says nothing of Culloden, and dims the lights on the battle and its outcome with the lapidary, ‘The rest is well-known’. 3. Guy Mannering features the generation after that of 1745 (most of the action takes place ‘near the end of the American War’, round about 1780), while The Antiquary is decidedly contemporary (1793–1794). The links between the novels are inconsistent, if not inexistent: they all deal with things Scottish, of course, but that is all; the fervour of the ’45 is gone. The later events of Waverley’s life are not recounted in some kind of saga. At the same time, Scott seasons his new plots with slight sprinklings of the supernatural, which turn out to be mere accessories;19 and yet, the pace is faster, more urgent, and preannounces English sensationalism many years in the future (the setting is temporarily shifted to India, and the action involves imprisonment, a big-hearted peasant, smugglers, a gypsy and a diabolical lawyer). At the end, an improbably forgetful Bertram feels something stirring in his memory cells, and as in the best fairy-tales, he begins to remember and recognize. Like Miranda in The Tempest, he has at first only a vague recollection of his past; he is assisted by a Prospero-like astrologer and a gypsy who looks for all the world like one of the witches from Macbeth. However, Guy Mannering is not a novel with a passive witness for a hero: the character, Mannering, might be considered such, and in fact he usurps a title which should, by right, belong to Bertram. With a few minor adjustments – or maybe none – the plot might be mistaken for one by Dickens, full of extraordinary adventures, with the addition of a device that was to be over-exploited by Victorian novelists, and is here the hub of the action: the young man who is kidnapped, and is unaware of

19

The novel originally focused on Mannering, who, endowed with astrological powers, prophesies that Bertram will encounter a great peril, which he will overcome with considerable effort. Little by little this storyline is abandoned.

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being the heir to a fortune, which, in the end, he inherits, thus providing the appropriate happy ending with the triumph of virtue and the defeat of evil. Five-year-old Harry Bertram is snatched from his parents’ home in Scotland by a villain – predictably, a crooked lawyer – who wants to get his hands on his inheritance. He finds himself in the army in India without knowing who he is, giving rise to a suggestive metaphysical speculation on the subject of identity. He then returns to Scotland under the name of Brown, and falls in love with the daughter of a colonel, Guy Mannering, who, mistakenly, thinks he wants to seduce his wife. Bertram is about to be kidnapped for the second time in his life, when a gypsy, Meg Merrilies, uncovers the plot. The villain and his henchman are dealt with. Justice is served. Such are the bare bones of the plot, to which should be added two minor characters: the peasant, Dandie Dinmont, and the tutor, Sampson. Like the true precursor of Dickens that he is, Scott dazzles the reader with surreal flashes involving sudden demonic appearances, somewhat smothered by longer, less gripping sections (such as the history of the gypsies in Scotland, ‘justified’ by the need to provide some context for the figure of Meg Merrilies, but which Dickens would have avoided).20 It should be remembered that Dickens would have been dissuaded from dragging his feet by a small but important advantage he had over Scott – serialized publication, which naturally proceeded by means of violent, sensational plot twists. Dickens would also have been more proficient in handling the gap between Bertram’s kidnapping and his return, seventeen eventful years, sketchily summed up in a letter to a friend written by Mannering, who, like Bertram, has just returned to Scotland. On the other hand, Scott is entirely convincing when, in elegiac mode, he describes the state of abandonment of Ellangowan, where Bertram’s senile father lies dying. The narrative form is less rough, more refined than Scott is usually given credit for, and one whole section consists of letters from Julia Mannering to a school friend awash with gushing enthusiasms, girlish gossip, and mannerisms reminiscent, not so much of Richardson as of Smollett’s Lydia Melford. Scott

20 The scene at the end of chapter 44, featuring Bertram and Dandie’s prison meal, bears comparison with similar ones in Dickens.

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always wants to put his fellow-countrymen in a good light, and succeeds in moving both himself and his readers with his description of the upright, healthy, welcoming family of the good peasant, Dinmont, in an episode that is already pre-Victorian. 4. The Antiquary, memorably attacked by E. M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel (he considered it a succession of unconnected episodes and coldly competent purple passages), shows all the signs of Scott’s tendency to verbosity with consequent slowing down of the plot. Almost a quarter of the novel is given over to a portrayal of the quasi-Jonsonian ‘humour’ represented by the antiquary as he illustrates to the hero, Major Neville – under the assumed name of Lovel – whom he has met by chance, the rarities of his immense library, and entertains him and other guests with an endless, pedantic guided tour through little-known aspects of Scottish history and traditions. It is obvious that Scott revels in this kind of writing, and equally undeniable that the reader often has to suppress a yawn or two. This novel, like the previous ones, employs the motif of double identity, only that here it is a stratagem used by the protagonist, who is rumoured to be illegitimate. The story temporarily comes to life when a storm threatens the lives of Sir Arthur and his daughter, Isabella, who are saved from drowning by Lovel, assisted by one of Scott’s typical ‘characters’, a colourful beggar by the name of Ochiltree. The usual splash of the supernatural is administered by the green room, in which Lovel is visited by a ghost, and, less humorously, by a German charlatan, who leads Isabella’s father to believe that a chest full of gold sovereigns lies buried near a ruined castle. In the end, all suspense is eliminated, and the true identity behind the assumed name of Lovel revealed: he is of noble stock, and thus entitled to claim the hand of Isabella. 5. In Old Mortality (1816), as if to prove his lack of prejudice, and, indeed, his ‘democratic’ leanings, Scott adopts the point of view of the Presbyterian Covenanters and traces the fortunes of Henry Morton, who joins their ranks after 1678 and up to the accession of William of Orange. However, he does his utmost to distance his character from the more extreme positions of that formation. Arrested for hiding a fanatic who has unwittingly killed a bishop, he escapes the gallows and becomes a Covenanter – in fact, a leader, though he does not share the general

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fanaticism (so, he too is neutral and equidistant). True to script, however, he loves the daughter of a royalist lady, called Edith, who saves him from capital punishment. Morton, in turn, sole romantic surrounded by pragmatic blood-letters, returns the favour by sparing, not once but several times, the rival who has saved him. Edith believes he has died in battle, but he re-appears on the scene on the day Edith is due to marry his rival (William of Orange has just set foot on English soil). Morton thus turns into a double of Waverley, because he leads a group of Whig rebels and Covenanters while ignoring other fanatics whose agenda is violence at all costs (see, in particular, the war council in chapter 20, and the attack on the royalist castle, ruled by an old lady loyal to the crown, and home to Edith, loved by the rebel chief, Henry Morton himself ). The climax of the story comes in the famous battle of Bothwell Bridge, won by the royalist forces. Morton is exiled instead of executed, and the novel ends with his return, ten years later, in 1689, the year of the generally accepted settlement represented by the Glorious Revolution, and which, in terms of the novel itself, implies the physical elimination of the fanatical elements among the rebels. Old Mortality has always been considered one of Scott’s most successful interweavings of history and fiction. It contains some memorable descriptive passages, and is also the most organized and concentrated (with a time range of ten years) of all Scott’s historical novels, in spite of the rather limp love story. Technically speaking, the novel is layered, the outer shell being the account of a grave-cleaner called ‘Old Mortality’. The crowd scenes are well-handled, particularly the one of the royalist troops arriving at the home of Morton’s miserly uncle in the middle of lunch, which provides fuel for much grotesque humour. Furthermore, all the dialogues are examples of skilful verbal fencing. At the opposite end of the spectrum stands Tillietudlem castle, the Cavalier stronghold, repeatedly presented in polyphonic mode, with all the harmonious or inharmonious voices of the servants’ quarters. 6. The Black Dwarf (1816), one of Scott’s few ‘long short stories’ has no significant historical content: it is simply the portrait of a dwarf reputed to be evil, shown, on various occasions, to be a benefactor, and revealed, in the end, as a rich baronet who has been spurned by the woman he loves. This is the stuff of opera, one might think, and, indeed, there is more than a whiff

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of the demonic in a plot that is not a thousand miles away from Byron’s mythologizing of physical deformity. The Legend of Montrose (1819) deals with a highlight in recent Scottish history, the outbreak of civil war, which forms the background of the story, partly historically true, of bloody, mindless vengeance. History itself is shunted into the background, or, rather, subjected to ‘mock-heroic’ sarcastic and, even, desecrating deformation. Surprisingly, Scott points to two repercussions of the Civil War: the paranoia of the sinister, brutal murderer, Allan; and the almost burlesque figure of the quixotic captain, Dugald Dalgetty, who, in the historical context of violent contrasts, affirms nonchalantly that he can support either side. Allan and Menteith contend for Annot, a Romantic icon of a harpist who plays and sings soft, airy melodies. This story of passion is loosely tied up with the historical events of the war in 1644. The final twist is emblematic: blinded by jealousy, Allan stabs Menteith just as he is about to be married to Annot, but Menteith has prudently put on a bulletproof vest under his uniform. § 209. Scott IV: The Scottish historical novels II. The last Jacobite Controversial, judged by some to be a, if not the masterpiece by Scott, by others dismissed as insignificant, and, even, a kind of artistic sub-product,21 Rob Roy (1817) does, in fact, travel at two speeds and displays two opposing faces. At first the story is insipid, and creeps along unconvincingly;22 then, all of a sudden, the reader is met with a great, tumultuous tour de force of happenings and mishaps. This explains why it has become something of a cult novel, praised by Stevenson and Buchan, abridged for children, and turned into screenplay for, often quite free, cinematographic adaptations.

Lauber 1966, 98–101, is particularly crushing when he affirms that Rob Roy presents ‘no development in technique’, something which is obviously not true. In fact, the novel becomes a kind of memoir, written in the first person by the protagonist, Frank Osbaldistone, a formal variant never before used by Scott. The initial impression is that of a parody of the kind of eighteenth-century novel that deals with humdrum rural life, only slightly ruffled by the odd minor incident. 22 Scott indulges in an excessive amount of dialogue in broad Scots, often involving the gardener, Andrew Fairservice, a Sancho Panza to the Quixotic Frank. 21

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Scott might be accused of overreaching in this oblique attempt to tackle a subject such as the conflict between ancient and modern, and the early eighteenth-century rise of mercantilism in opposition to the feudal system of landowning aristocracy – in other words, the labyrinth of London as against the archaic oasis of the Borders, or ‘prose’ versus ‘poetry’. Frank Osbaldistone, the son of a London merchant, has studied in France, and feels destined to become a poet. He refuses to work in his father’s firm, and, as a punishment, is sent to live with his uncle and his six cousins in Northumberland. For the first time, Scott sets a ‘Scottish historical novel’ not north, but south of the border. It is also the first explicitly anti-Catholic and anti-Jacobite novel, at least in the sense that the family of Frank’s uncle is anything but honest and upright, and his wicked cousin, Rashleigh, who is about to be ordained a priest,23 is the classic villain, whose intention it is to strip Frank of all he has – social position, prestige and wealth. Historical facts demand respect, so Rob Roy, the leader of the Jacobite rebels, ends up by supporting the repression by the government forces, and siding with the royalists, who proceed to exterminate the worst members of the uncle’s family. What is sure is that Frank resolutely gathers a company of royalist troops and returns to Scotland at its head, and that the hypocritical Jacobite, Rashleigh, betrays his cause and turns traitor. Then ‘History’ withdraws into the background again, giving way to a novel of intrigue, which must be assessed and appreciated by a completely different set of parameters to those of the historical novel. In terms of probability, verisimilitude, and psychological insight, Rob Roy crumbles page by page, more than any other of Scott’s novels. The whole question of the bankruptcy of the firm of Osbaldistone and Tresham is shrouded in mystery and never explained clearly; we know that the villain, Rashleigh, the narrator’s cousin, steals the firm’s assets, but we are never given the details. Just as unsatisfactory – rather dreamlike and unreal – is Frank’s search, in the Highlands, for some

23

Relying on his legal background, Scott makes an affirmation that may or may not be in accordance with the official Canon Law of the time: he states that no-one with a physical disability – in Rashleigh’s case, his limp – could be ordained as a Roman Catholic priest.

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mysterious documents that might save his father’s firm from bankruptcy.24 Similar incongruities help to create a controlled estrangement; in any case, the genre of adventure and intrigue novels does not deal in explanations. As in the classics of the genre just mentioned, Rob Roy features mortal duels interrupted just in time, coups with an uncertain outcome, adventures involving incredible captures and escapes; and misunderstandings, mirages, identities at first mistaken then revealed (Rob Roy’s presence is felt in a large part of the novel, but he actually appears on the scene, under a different name, only three-quarters of the way through); then again, spells, ghosts that turn out to be no such thing, shouts and whispers, stealthy creeping, a great trek through the mountains to find the hidden gold, treasure hunts with coded messages and indecipherable names. The laws governing this literary genre do not call for ‘rounded’ characters, and anyone expecting to find them cannot condemn the novel for not providing them. As in every fast-moving ‘thriller’, the only real objective is movement itself; verisimilitude, or probability, is not an issue. As we proceed from one climax to another, and from one adventure to the next, it is not hard to see why Stevenson liked this novel so much, and why it held such power of attraction for someone like John Buchan, the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps, a spy-story that, in the mysterious impenetrability of many details of the picaresque journey (through almost the same Scottish landscape), resembles Rob Roy on several counts, leaving the reader with a sense of déjà vu.25 Following this line of thought, it is entirely possible that Graham Greene, too, might have been a fan of this particular novel by Scott. Rob Roy ends with a kind of twist: the fascinating (and mysterious) Jacobite huntress, Diana Vernon, is hiding in the Osbaldistone residence with her father, who pretends at times to be a ghost, at others a Catholic priest, and has been taken by Frank to be the husband of the woman he loves. Diana and her father are about to be seized by Rashleigh and the government forces when Rob Roy comes out into the open, dispatches Rashleigh, and brings about the customary happy ending. 24 Frank is a fey, defined by Scott in another novel as one who is ‘impelled towards oncoming doom by some irresistible necessity’. 25 Volume 7, § 59.2–3.

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2. In The Heart of Midlothian26 (1818) Scott focuses on a different historical event: the so-called Porteous Riots of 1736. Porteous was a captain of the Edinburgh City Guard who ordered his soldiers to fire into the crowd gathered to watch the hanging of a thief. Porteous was arrested, tried, sentenced and imprisoned to await execution. A mob stormed the prison, seized Porteous and hanged him. Such are the historical facts on which Scott constructed the fictional story of the two half-sisters, Effie and Jeanie Deans. The ringleader of the uprising, Robinson, is the fiancé of Effie, who has been imprisoned on the charge of killing her baby. During the trial, it emerges that she might be acquitted on the strength of some legal quibble (which Scott, as a lawyer, makes a point of underlining), but her sister Jeanie refuses to perjure herself by declaring she was aware that her sister was pregnant. Effie is sentenced to death. In one of the most famous scenes in all of Scott’s novels, Jeanie arrives in London and, thanks to the intervention of the Duke of Argyle, obtains an audience with Queen Caroline, who pardons her sister, Effie. The happy ending, crowned by two weddings – Jeanie marries an upright Presbyterian minister, while Effie becomes the wife of her seducer, and, therefore, Lady Staunton – turns into tragedy when, years later, Robinson is killed by a man who turns out to be his son (not dead, then, but kidnapped at birth). The son has become an outlaw in the Highlands, and, after killing Robinson, escapes to America and joins an Indian tribe. The opening of the novel, a fine, gripping description of the Porteous Riots, is followed by a slower-moving account of the two sisters from birth onwards, up to the period when Effie discovers she is pregnant and ends up in court. At this point Scott inserts a well-crafted portrait of a patriarch of the Cameron clan, the father of the two sisters: a firm believer in the sanctity of work, he reads the Bible constantly, meditates, preaches, and prays. It is as though Scott were celebrating here one of the many variants of Scottish religiousness, in this case a Cameron sub-sect. The portrait of the commanding patriarch is only slightly tinged with irony. At the end the devout Jeanie is rewarded, thus justifying her apparently ungenerous behaviour during the trial, when a white lie – the result 26 The title is a metaphor, though for the Scots it is a catachresis, since it represented the prison of Edinburgh.

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of an inhumane legal cavil – might have saved her sister’s life. The Heart of Midlothian constitutes a model that will be developed a couple of decades later. Scott makes clear an inverted reference to King Lear, and Christina Rossetti, in turn, refers back to Scott in ‘Goblin Market’, which features two sisters, one of them rational and dour, the other romantic, loitering, and always late, and where the latter goes astray and is saved by the other, self-sacrificing sister. Effie can also be seen as a forerunner of George Eliot’s Hetty Sorrel, and the first instance of the theme of the ‘fallen woman’ in Victorian fiction. The Heart of Midlothian is also a ‘trial novel’, like those by Trollope, and, at a certain point, Scott the lawyer sheds light on the deliberations – some of them debatable, others downright barbarous – of the Edinburgh courts (chapter XXII contains a question-and-answer section, like the penultimate episode of Ulysses). The novel is longer than many others by Scott, approaching the overall length of the Victorian serial,27 and just as action-packed and ‘never-ending’. Another disconcerting character is the so-called ‘madwoman’ (who does not, however, live in an attic, and whose madness is never actually described or proved): Madge Wildfire, the midwife who hands Effie’s new-born child over to the gang of outlaws. 3. Donizetti had his librettist trim the plot of The Bride of Lammermoor (1819) of all the background information and details that make the novel slow-reading. On the other hand, some incidents which, in the novel, are dealt with summarily – almost casually – are, in the libretto of Lucia di Lammermoor, blown up to gigantic proportions. The historical terminus a quo is the Glorious Revolution, when the Scottish nobleman, Ravenswood, a supporter of the Jacobites, is forced to hand over his castle and his rank to a Williamite, a canny lawyer by the name of Ashton. His son, Edgar Ravenswood, is obliged to swallow his pride and thirst for vengeance, and make peace with his enemy (an allegory of the historical need for a peace process between the two warring factions). During a hunt, Edgar saves Ashton’s daughter, Lucy, from a mad bull. He falls in love with her and she with him. He is faced with a dilemma: to leave without marrying Lucy in compliance of his family’s hostility towards the Ashtons, or give

27

There were four, not three, volumes, and the internal divisions are clearly visible.

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in to his feelings and marry the girl. The situation is complicated by the fact that Edgar is penniless and a Jacobite, whereas Lucy is in a position to command an advantageous marriage settlement. Enter, at this point, a character who does not appear in the libretto, the haughty, Machiavellian Lady Ashton, Lucy’s mother, who forces her to marry the Laird of Bucklaw. On the wedding night, she goes mad and stabs her husband, then dies. In the meantime, Ravenswood dies in a quicksand while riding to challenge Bucklaw, little knowing that Lucy is already dead. Scott cannot help inserting large chunks of Scots into the otherwise colourless and superfluous tirades of the Ravenswood butler. Blind Alice is a partly Wordsworthian minor character, and governess at the time when the castle still belonged to the Ravenswood family; she prophesies that the family will be cursed. 4. Redgauntlet (1824) is Scott’s second- or third-greatest work, an unexpected resurgence of genius in a phase of inexorable decline, and might have been his greatest, tout court, were it not for two fatal structural flaws. He could have carried on with the formula of the historical novel in epistolary and diary form, instead of reverting to the safer omniscient narrator of the traditional novel; as it is, Redgauntlet is enriched by some of the most telling, dramatic – as well as humorous – of Scott’s characters, though these, as usual, are offset by others that are weak, unconvincing, and unhelpful to the book as a whole. In 1824, Scott returned, in extremis, to Scottish history, and, in particular, to the subject of the Jacobite ‘risings’. The novel deals with the (unhistorical) attempt by the Young Pretender, with the help of an equally unhistorical Hugh Redgauntlet, to regain the English throne, and the failure of this rebellion. Like Bertram in Guy Mannering, Darsie Latimer has been kidnapped as a child, and gradually discovers, to his amazement, that though formally a Presbyterian, he belongs to a fiercely Jacobite family; in other words, he is a dreamer, like Waverley, who observes and attempts to interpret the multifarious spectacle of Scottish history at the middle of the eighteenth century. The ploy of the belated agnition – in this case the hero discovers he is the son and grandson of renowned Jacobites – is never more efficiently handled than here. George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda may have been influenced by Redgauntlet in that her hero, too, discovers his real, quite unexpected identity, which leads him to doubt certain, quite contrary beliefs, so that he becomes a kind of condottiero of his ‘people’.

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In a pre-Kafka nightmare, Darsie Latimer is imprisoned by some mysterious authority, whose identity is revealed later on in the novel. He thinks he loves a woman who is his sister, learns the origin of the name by which he is known, and is, of course, heir to a substantial property in England. So Scott goes only so far in his historical rehabilitation of the Jacobites: his occasional, instinctive enthusiasm for their cause gives way to their dismissal as a faction of quarrelling, boastful amateurs.28 What appears to be either confusion or connivance in the Jacobites stands out when they attack ‘papists’, voice their support for a Catholic monarch, and distance themselves from genuine Catholicism. With the author’s approval, Darsie Latimer dissipates all doubts as to his allegiance, and is led back to the fold. The status quo is restored and Jacobitism routed definitively. 5. In Redgauntlet, Scott creates a formal alternative: he drafts first an epistolary novel in which the main, almost only, correspondence is from Darsie Latimer (we discover later that his real name is Arthur Redgauntlet) to his friend, Alan Fairford, a law student. A hasty reader might think the format oddly inappropriate and the letters themselves awkward, artificial and mannered, with the sole function of providing background information. Then, gradually, the subplot emerges of the coming rebellion, in which Darsie finds himself involved. The letters convey information of visual and dialogic events from the point of view of the oblivious day-dreamer, Latimer. For example, Hugh Redgauntlet appears first in a group of horsemen engaged in spearing salmon from the saddle – symbolically prophetic of the ‘capture’ of his nephew, Arthur, to be used in the uprising.29 The mystery thickens when Fairford affirms in one of his letters that he has been warned by an unknown lady that Latimer is in danger and is required to cut short his holiday on the west coast of Scotland. The ‘tale within a tale’ of ‘Wandering Willie’, often extrapolated and used in anthologies, is 28

The Pretender’s grandiose proclamations, backed by Hugh Redgauntlet, are shown up as empty rhetoric when he is discovered to be involved in an adulterous affair; all the potential rebels head off for the safety of exile abroad. Hugh Redgauntlet takes refuge in France, where he becomes a priest and dies an almost saintly death. 29 Hugh Redgauntlet thinks, mistakenly, that his nephew has feudal power over his tenants.

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a small masterpiece in the Gothic-demonic genre (a tenant is asked for the receipt to prove he has paid his rent to his now dead laird; being unable to do so, the dead man’s son sends him to seek out the old man’s ghost. The tenant returns from his supernatural encounter clutching the receipt in his hand). It is also a fine example of an artificial language (though composed in broad Scots) and foreshadows and ‘pre-echoes’ Finnegans Wake, or any other Joycean coiner of new languages like, for example, Anthony Burgess. When Scott interrupts the flow of letters, and switches to the diary form, the novel becomes a collection of documents in the first person, communicated via a fictitious external editor. Suspension is, however, controlled, and, as it were, violently breached every time Scott pops up in brackets to add a note, or clarify and/or correct some character’s statement. In the end the novel, unfortunately, gets back on track, and Scott seems to admit that to use the epistolary mode throughout would have required, of itself, an extraordinary tour de force, and made it difficult to handle the convergence of the stories of the two correspondents. One of the subplots involves Alan Fairford, who without hesitation and from an inflexibly Protestant position, sets out to find his friend, determined to snatch him from the maw of Jacobitism. The account of Fairford’s legal vicissitudes is meant to be funny, with its gallery of eccentric, garrulous locals, though the reader might think that some decisive paring would have benefited this otherwise fine novel. § 210. Scott V: ‘Ivanhoe’ In Scott’s macrotext, Ivanhoe (1819) might seem to be a case of substitution, proportion or mathematical anticipation: the Saxons are to the Normans as the Jacobites to the Hanoverians; the doomed Saxons stand for Romanticism, and the Normans for brutal pragmatism and a ramshackle, ineffectual Machiavellianism – which is, up to a certain point, a historical commonplace. In Scott’s view, the early thirteenth century was a period of great upheavals and turbulence, and, especially, institutional chaos generated by the absence of a centre of power – Richard the Lionheart was in the Holy Land, and the kingdom of England had been entrusted to his brother, John, a weak but ambitious schemer. According to Scott, the Saxons still dreamed of re-conquering the country from the Norman

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aggressors, or, at least, of reaching a compromise entailing cohabitation based on equality. Scott the historian trots out the well-known forecast of the birth of Middle and Modern English from the fusion of Anglo-Saxon and Norman-French, and states the obvious when he adds that the objective was to transfer this fusion peacefully onto a political and social plane. As he progresses in the book, the reader becomes more and more convinced that Scott is decidedly anti-Norman. In a synecdochic representation, in the central episode Saxons and Jews are imprisoned in a manor by a number of Norman ringleaders; Isaac is blackmailed, and his daughter harassed and molested by one of the knights, while another Templar attempts to seduce Rowena notwithstanding his vow of chastity. That Scott is on the side of the Saxons is clear from the very beginning, when the Norman nobles and knights shamelessly flaunt their corruption, dissipation, vulgarity and sensuality, which provide grist to the ironic mill for a ‘fool’ and a swineherd. At the other end of the moral spectrum, the Saxon noble, Cedric, offers hospitality to a Jew ill-treated by the powerful Normans, an episode that will be remembered when the Norman persecution of the Jews becomes even more despicable. The Saxons are often presented as laudatores temporis acti and the custodians of ancient values. Unlike the binary structure of the Scottish novels, in which tertium non datur, in Ivanhoe three ethnic groups are ranged one against the other. In the characters of Isaac and his daughter, Rebecca, Scott pays homage to the tiny community of Jews existing within the English population. There can be no doubt that Scott is proJewish here, much more clearly and unambiguously so than Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice.30 Scott shows the Jews of the beginning of the thirteenth century as terrorized and subject to every kind of unjust and inhumane persecution, as well as physical violence. However, with respect to what the playwright, Arnold Wesker, says of the play by Shakespeare, the Jews were useful, especially to the future King John, who needed their money to fund his policies, pleasures and perversions; so they were tolerated one day and tortured the next, in great demand one day, and damned the next. Another tile is visible in the ideological mosaic of the novel: Scott is 30 See Volume 2, § 31.4, also for the references to Wesker below.

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inevitably against King John and in favour of King Richard, but this situation is changeable, and the issues are debated time and again. Scott knows how deeply rooted the conflict is. To blame the English for the permanent state of internal warfare is an error, for the entire history of the island is one of continuous invasions and imperfect fusions between different ethnic groups. The disconcerting fact is that, while Scott is unambiguously antiNorman, he is not absolutely and acritically on the side of the Saxons. In fact, already in the thirteenth century, the future Jacobite dream is seen as depending on unity of intent; differences must be overcome in order to form a movement of political resistance to the regime in power. The same flaw that causes the failure of the Jacobite rebellion undermines the Saxon league. Within the Saxon army, too, there are differences in moral stature and consistency: Cedric makes a bad mistake when he nominates as leader of the troops the passive, morally weak Athelstane, rather than Ivanhoe. 2. As a matter of fact, Ivanhoe is a historical novel but also a Spenserianstyle diorama, and, as such, also, at times, a parody of the chivalric genre, of romance and the Gothic. It is a non-stop outpouring of episodes containing elements of realism mixed with the ludic, fantastic, comic and surreal, along with a generous sprinkling of the classic ingredients of post-Ariosto romance – Christians, Jews, Saracens, jolly friars, witches, caves and dungeons, jousts and duels, gigantic, overweening feats of strength, feigned blows and blows that strike home, saints and sinners, hypocrites and noble heroes, and, above all, last-minute rescues when the reader already knows that any tragic ending will be successfully averted. Scott’s story flows beautifully, though it is too often marred by verbosity and lengthy descriptions of heraldic devices that contribute nothing to the plot and often detract from the in-depth analysis of the characters. On the inevitable wilderness (every romance worth its name has one) there roams a ‘Desdichado’. But who hides behind this name and conceals his face with a helmet? Who unhorses all his adversaries in the magnificent tournament? Who crowns Rowena the queen of beauty? Who pays the Jew in gold for the horse and jousting costume? The second masked horseman’s harness and finery are clearly Spenserian (though Scott repeatedly refers to Ariosto), and the rider himself is called the Black Prince or Knight, anticipating the name of Edward IV’s son, and who turns out to be none other than King Richard himself, back from the Holy Land.

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The Knight ends up in the company of a hermit, actually Friar Tuck, who abandons his disguise after helping the Saxons in their fight against the Normans. The false hermit dominates a later banquet scene characterized by Pantagruelian eating, drinking and singing. The macro-sequence of the imprisonment of Cedric’s Saxons, and of Isaac and Rebecca, is very ‘Gothic’ – the castle and underground cells where Norman brutes slobber over the comeliness of the two unsullied maidens. It is not the influence of Spenser alone that is evident here, but that of Radcliffe and Walpole. When the jester, Wamba, goes into the castle disguised as a friar, Ivanhoe rises to the summit of mock-heroic literature. Wamba hands over his friar costume to Cedric, who thus is given unexpected freedom of movement in the castle, unrecognized, against all the odds, by the unobservant gaolers. In this circumstance, Cedric belies his previously wooden figure; indeed, he acts his part to perfection, pretending he is going to meet the allies of the Normans bearing a request for help against the besiegers. The three Norman soldiers find they have been fooled, and, in best miles gloriosus tradition, fall into one hole after another. When Ivanhoe, who has been wounded in the joust, is taken care of by Rebecca inside the castle, the various phases of the siege are observed, as if they were happening on a stage, by Rebecca; she looks out through a chink in the wall and describes all she sees to the convalescent Ivanhoe, who is thus informed of the noble deeds of the still mysterious Black Knight. In the finale, the pace accelerates even more, with a string of episodes that vary in tone from the heroic to the mock-heroic and Gothic. The Saxon Ulrica gives vent to her anger against the Normans by setting fire to the castle; the Knight Templar is infatuated with Rebecca, and kidnaps her, oblivious to the flames which, it appears, will devour Isaac and Ivanhoe. The Saxon chieftain, Athelstane, thinks the girl who has been kidnapped is Rowena, and is about to block the kidnapper, but is dispatched by a mighty axe-blow. The Black Knight, in the end, saves Ivanhoe. True to his premise, Scott has the victorious Saxons pardon the vanquished Normans; the Jew, threatened with Shylock’s doom, is spared, and taken back into the fold of society. The several pardons, however, are always slightly humorous and somewhat in the manner of Ariosto. One doubtful, not to say deplorable scene, however, is that of Athelstane’s ‘ghost’, who appears only to announce that he is not dead, but was buried alive. Rebecca, tried

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and convicted of witchcraft, is sentenced to be burned at the stake, but is saved at the last moment by Ivanhoe, who, as her champion, challenges her seducer to a duel. Cedric, like the Jacobites of the future, is forced to give up his dream of a Saxon restoration; Ivanhoe marries Rowena, who becomes a friend of Rebecca (this is of great symbolic significance) before Rebecca announces she is about to emigrate to Granada. All prospects of integration are postponed. The love part of the story is unsatisfactory and one is left with the impression that Ivanhoe has, perhaps, married Rowena for political reasons, while he would actually have preferred Rebecca. This is how Thackeray was to interpret the situation in his humorous continuation of the tale of Ivanhoe.31 § 211. Scott VI: The last phase So far we have looked at less than half of Scott’s fiction. At this point, the question arises: did he do nothing else of value? Is such a falling off, such a disparity in value possible? His contemporaries were the first to advance judgements that not only differed from one another, but were diametrically opposed: some novels were seen as almost masterpieces, only to be demoted by the following generations. They avoided being called the ‘worst’ only because they were followed, in the canon, by others judged even more lacking in literary value, and so on, in a seemingly endless race to the bottom. Modern criticism, too, tends to be non-committal, or dismissive of the novels of this last period, and the literary historian, whose task it is to measure the resonance and radiation released by texts through time, can but register the decline of these two parameters, and opts for a proportionally decreasing amount of attention to be dedicated to these final novels, never forgetting, of course, that the tide of critical fortune may wax as well as wane. Today’s critical Solomon might reach the verdict that after 1819 Scott occasionally produced some fine writing, as may be seen in some of the examples I have examined so far, but these were mixed with other, less inspired novels, written to ride a wave of popular demand for ever more romantic plots, full of breathtaking suspense and extraordinary twists and 31

Volume 5, § 70.2–3.

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turns, with about the same dose of the sensational as Shakespeare’s last plays, but leaning more towards adventure and hair-raising escapades. A similar propensity for the machinery of melodrama can be seen in the oscillation between heroic, or lofty, plots and stories of everyday life, with an abundance of comic characters, representing verbal or behavioural humours marked by nervous tics and fixations. Not many of these narrative exploits have survived the test of time, and, after a brief flash of contemporary fame, have been all but forgotten. On the other hand, Scott as a historical novelist never changes: there is, of course, no consistency in the choice of times and places and he responds to irresistible urges of the moment and draws inspiration from this book or that for stories which he develops with his usual fertile imagination. All too often, an idea which, at the beginning of the story, is fresh and promising, is ruined by the author’s failure to develop it and bring it to a convincing conclusion, largely owing to haste and the desire to wrap up the book as quickly as possible. In other words, Scott had by now exhausted the vein of the Jacobite uprisings, and was forced to widen his scope, resorting to booklore, from which he gleaned all kinds of historical details and arcane references to long-gone, curious events. One exception to the general decline of quality of Scott’s last works is the group of novels set in the Elizabethan age – 1550 to 1600 circa – which proved to be a mine of memorable and mighty events and characters; perfect material for the novelist, in short. Within this period, Scott presents imaginary or half-real events involving various kinds of conflicts, be they of love or of politics. However, his vision of history remains binary and contrastive, and the characters are either Catholics or hard-line Puritans. 2. The Monastery (1820) and The Abbot (1820) constitute a historical diptych based on a period and a series of extraordinary protagonists that Scott had not previously exploited: the end of the sixteenth century and the ever-intriguing story of the rivalry between Elizabeth and Mary, Queen of Scots. Clearly, he is interested, as usual, in the heroic contest between two mighty, larger-than-life figures. In The Monastery, he tells a fictional story based on a monastery that really existed, at a time when the wind of Reformation was sweeping over Scotland. The invented plot hinges on two brothers, one of whom is in love with a certain Mary, but gives her up in order to become a Benedictine monk; the other marries

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the girl previously contended by the two brothers. Once again, the typical Scott construction technique is used, with a doubling and redoubling of the original dualism: the results are irreconcilable antagonism or a friendly settlement of differences. In reality, this module is used as a container for a quite incredible amount of Gothic and sensational elements that follow closely on one another, so that in the end the plot is rendered all but incomprehensible. Roger Avenel, a relative of the two brothers of The Monastery, becomes, in The Abbot, the crafty page of Mary Stuart during her imprisonment in Lochleven Castle. Secretly brought up as a Catholic, Avenel, instead of spying on her, becomes a loyal ally of the Queen of Scots, also because he is in love with one of her maids-in-waiting. Soon, Scott runs out of ideas, and resorts to an old ploy of his: he turns the young page into the incognito heir of the Avenel fortune; as such, he is pardoned and can marry the woman he loves. Kenilworth (1821), too, taps into the rich vein of Elizabethan England – largely imaginary, as has been proved –32 and presents the story of Leicester, the Queen’s favourite, and his secret marriage to Amy Robsart. When some courtly oaf claims to be her husband, she is forced to come out into the open; at Kenilworth, she reveals to the Queen that she is, in fact, the Countess of Leicester. Her husband, confessing, confirms. A series of tragic misunderstandings leads to the death of Amy and the end of the novel. The story itself is fast moving and gripping, but is in parts weighed down by Scott’s usual delight in scenes of pomp and circumstance, and minutely detailed descriptions that verge on pedantry, and are, in many cases, quite dispensable. Further ballast is added in the inevitable array of minor characters, some of them engaging, others less so. 3. With The Pirate (1822) we are back in seventeenth-century Scotland, or, more precisely, Shetland. A mysterious recluse, by the name of Mertoun, has a son, Mordaunt, who, extrovert and sociable, is quite the opposite in temperament to his father. Mordaunt is a frequent visitor to the house of 32

There are two hypotheses as to the cause of Amy Robsart’s death: suicide or accident. Neither has been proved conclusively. Scott skilfully exploits the potential of this historical mystery.

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Magnus Troil, a property owner with two daughters of diametrically different characters – one is romantic and dreamy, the other down-to-earth and business-like. A pirate, shipwrecked off the coast and saved from drowning by Mordaunt, falls in love with, and is loved in return, by Minna Troil, thus arousing the enmity of the man who has saved him. Mordaunt is pitied by Brenda, the other sister, who falls in love with him. The Ibsen flavour of the novel is strengthened by the arrival on the scene of Mordaunt’s putative mother, who, significantly, proclaims herself a Norn. By the time the pirate is unmasked and the Norn discovered to be the mother of the pirate, whose father, in turn, is none other than Mertoun – and therefore Mordaunt’s mother, too, from a different father – the novel has become a remake of ancient Norse sagas, and an anticipation of the pessimism to be found in Wagner and Ibsen fifty years later. The novel is certainly intriguing, but is spoilt by an over-complicated and contrived plot.33 4. In The Fortunes of Nigel (1822), Scott focuses once more on the reigns of two Stuart kings, on whom he bases a historical cycle and his own concept of the English, or, rather, Anglo-Scottish monarchy. James I and Charles II are the centre points of a story that mixes public life with the private concerns of individuals, all grounded in extraordinary historical or pseudo-historical facts. The novel stands out for the figure of Nigel, an ingénu, and for the demolition of James I, who is made to speak in an outlandish version of Scots, which led Coleridge to remark that Scott’s king is endowed with the eloquence of Shakespeare’s Holofernes. Another striking feature of the novel is the description of ‘Alsatia’, a notorious neighbourhood of Shadwell’s London (at a certain point in the story, Nigel becomes the objects of the advances of a watchmaker’s daughter, bringing to mind the Marston of Eastward Ho. That the allusion is deliberate is proved by the fact that there are two apprentices in the shop).34 Peveril of the Peak35 33

The figure of the pirate was enormously popular at the time, and appeared in many plays and operas. Maturin, not Scott, provided Bellini and his librettist, Romani, with inspiration for his 1827 opera, Il Pirata. 34 For Marston cf. Volume 1, § 106, and for Shadwell § 57.3, above. 35 The Peak District is part of the Pennines in Derbyshire.

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(1823), based on the Popish or Titus Oates Plot of 1678, features various coprotagonists, like the Duke of Buckingham (satirized by Dryden), Colonel Blood (would-be purloiner of the Crown Jewels), and Queen Henrietta’s dwarf. The novel is constructed on the conflict between two noblemen of opposing political convictions: the eponymous hero is a Cavalier, while the other is a Puritan (despite their differences, they respect each other). Inevitably, the son of one of them and the other’s daughter fall in love. When the Popish Plot breaks out, Julian Peveril learns, while in London, of the arrest of his father (a Catholic) by his future father-in-law. Alice, his betrothed, is taken to the king to become his mistress, but is saved by a mysterious deaf-and-dumb woman called Fenella (based, perhaps, on Goethe’s Mignon). The two Peverils, father and son, are involved in the Plot, arrested and then acquitted. The king is redeemed to a certain degree. 5. Quentin Durward (1823), a great hit in France and Italy, and responsible for a large number of fads, met with a mixed, and ultimately, negative reception in England. It may be linked with The Fortunes of Nigel, but is centred not on an English king, but on the astute French king, Louis XI, at odds with the ambitious Charles the Bold of Burgundy. The main historical event is the revolt of Liège, stirred up against his rival by Charles, with the assistance of the so-called ‘Boar of the Ardennes’. Durward is a Scottish archer who acts as a point of view and witness insofar as he forms part of Louis’s guard. Durward escorts a maid-of-honour who is destined to be given in marriage to an odious suitor. She rebels against this fate; Quentin falls in love with her and marries her while respecting the condition laid down by the Duke of Burgundy, which is that the maid will be given in marriage to whoever brings him the Boar’s head. A few years later, Scott wrote a sequel, Anne of Geierstein (1829), set first in England and then in Switzerland and Burgundy. It is by no means unusual for Scott to find inspiration in conflicts between two rival parties or factions, as if scouring history for ever-earlier examples of this basic motif. Edward IV had defeated the Lancastrian forces at Tewkesbury in 1471, and the exiled Earl of Oxford, John de Vere, and his son, Arthur, weave plots to favour the Lancastrian cause while pretending to be two ordinary merchants. In the Swiss mountains, the eponymous heroine, a young countess, saves Arthur’s life; father and son, accompanied by Anne,

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her father (an important Swiss magistrate) and a delegation, proceed to the Burgundian court, where they officially state their grievances and protest against the treatment handed out to Switzerland by the Duke of Burgundy. The two Englishmen find themselves in danger once more when they are taken prisoners by the governor of the citadel of Brisach, who is, however, overruled by the local Vehmgericht (a secret tribunal, whose proceedings Scott found in Goethe’s Goetz), and condemned. Up to this point, the novel is a sequence of nearly lethal attacks by both the fury of the elements and the forces of the enemies of freedom; the last part, instead, concentrates on diplomacy, and the Earl of Oxford’s successful attempt to stipulate an alliance between the King of France and the Duke of Burgundy. This includes the clause that, in return for the Duke of Burgundy’s support for the Lancastrian cause, the said duke will be given Provence. One might wonder whether Scott supports York or Lancaster; but it is as well to remember that he exploited the conflict without taking sides. He shone a light on the intrigues of international diplomacy, and, if he supported anything, it was the cause of freedom: in the end, Charles the Bold of Burgundy is defeated by the Swiss, and Arthur, the son of the English earl, gets the girl. 6. St Ronan’s Well (1824), set in an imaginary spa in contemporary Scotland, constitutes an obvious exception to the rest of Scott’s works in that it is the only one with declared satirical intentions. However, in spite of this innovative note, it was panned when it first appeared, and remains the least appreciated of the entire Scottian canon. The story of a scandal, audacious but restrained, it is based on the enmity of two brothers, sons of an earl, and their stratagems aimed at claiming the hand of the same heiress (Scott was actually thinking of inserting a rape, but Ballantyne, the publisher, demanded a tame exchange of persons instead).36 In a return to the Middle Ages, two novels were merged under the title, ‘Tales of the Crusades’. The first, The Talisman (1825), ties up with Ivanhoe and focuses on Richard the Lionheart in the Holy Land during the third Crusade. The

36 The suppressed pages have been reinstated in the 1995 Edinburgh University Press edition.

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‘talisman’ of the title is used by Saladin to heal the wounded Richard (a similar one was taken to Scotland by another combatant and is preserved there). The Christian nobles are, of course, disunited, and, in this, represent the principal European powers; but this is the background. The story concentrates, instead, on Kenneth, a poor Scottish crusader who challenges a Saracen emir (actually Saladin in disguise) to a duel, is reconciled to his enemy and becomes his friend. Berengaria, Richard’s queen, bewitches Kenneth and orders him to take a message to Edith, who is in love with him. For this ‘desertion’ Richard sentences him to death, but the crusader is saved by Saladin, who makes him his slave (the defence of slavery is unusual in Scott). Kenneth, dressed in Moorish garb and pretending to be a mute, saves Richard during an ambush. The damage, however, was not caused by Kenneth’s desertion but by a prince of Monserrat (Scott misreads the sources and calls him Monferrat), whom he challenges to a duel. Kenneth turns out to be Prince David of Scotland, and as such is in a position to marry the noble Edith. Clearly, The Talisman is a minor-key version of themes present in many others of Scott’s novels. The second element of the diptych, The Betrothed37 (1825), set in the reign of Henry II, tells the story of Eveline, besieged in Wales and rescued by Hugo (a vaguely Gothic motif ). In dire peril as she is, she promises to marry him, but later realizes that, though she might respect him, she cannot love him, owing to the great age difference. Hugo leaves for the Crusades, and Eveline falls in love with his nephew, thus finding herself in an excruciating dilemma. On his return, Hugo realizes he has made a mistake, and leaves the youngsters free to love one another. The story has great dramatic, if not melodramatic, potential, and indeed, though it has nothing to do with Manzoni’s famous novel, The Betrothed, it was exploited by the librettists of two operas by Verdi, Aroldo and Stiffelio. Scott pundits regularly condemn it, and enjoy pulling it to pieces. Structurally, it is typical of its author, with an ethnic struggle between Welsh barons and Norman lords (Eveline is a Norman). The setting is Welsh, and accordingly, the

37

Here, in the singular; as a plural, the word is commonly used to translate the title of Manzoni’s masterpiece, I Promessi Sposi.

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plot is vaguely ‘Tristanesque’, with two lovers who fight their feelings but cannot help falling in love, while old Hugo is far away. Woodstock (1826) is based on the legend of the ‘good devil of Woodstock’, who plagued the Parliamentarians quartered in the village near Oxford during the Civil War. The romantic plot hinges on the love between Everard (a turncoat Cavalier who has become a Parliamentarian and supporter of Cromwell) and Alice, whose father is hostile to their union on political grounds. While passing through Woodstock, the king, Charles I, sees Alice and falls in love with her, and, disguised as a page, proceeds to court her. Everard and the king thus become rivals, but Everard is persuaded not to betray Charles to Cromwell. The latter does however arrive on the scene, seeking to capture the king, who, by this time, has escaped. The two young lovers are free to marry. The supernatural has become a game, a mere ploy to plague the Roundheads with. The secondary characters are legion – self-professed Cavaliers, Presbyterian ministers, soldiers, preachers and spies. Cromwell is criticized by Scott for being an absolute dictator, while Everard supports the Restoration, and points to the author’s own political stance. 7. ‘The Highland Widow’,38 ‘The Two Drovers’ and ‘The Surgeon’s Daughter’, all published in 1827, are, in terms of size, short stories rather than novels as such, and are proportionally more sharply defined and faster in pace. They have aged well, and still make pleasant reading. They set out to exemplify the primordial passions of eighteenth-century Scotland, as well as the concept of honour, old-fashioned codes of behaviour and the patriotic ideals of a Scottish ‘Cavalleria Rusticana’. The first of the three tells of the murder of a Highland drover by an English counterpart of his, as the result of a quarrel. The murderer gives himself up to the law to await trial for this clearly premeditated murder (he has gone twelve miles out of his way to procure the knife he uses to kill his enemy). In the second, the main character is the widow of a bold Highland chieftain, who sees her

38

An effective title, indicating the demise, not only of a husband, but of a whole age of heroism. The stories are told by an internal narrator and form part of the ‘Chronicles of the Canongate’ (the reference is to the Canongate district of the city of Edinburgh).

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son growing up deaf to the call of his father’s noble ideals, and, as often in Scott, aware that little of them remains after the defeat of 1745. She looks on in dismay as her son joins a regiment bound for America (and therefore an enemy force). When he comes home on leave, she gives him a sleeping draught, then incites him to kill the sergeant who has come to take him back to the regiment. He is arrested and executed; the widow and now childless mother has doubled her lot of sorrow and regret. ‘The Surgeon’s Daughter’ is the most atypical story ever written by Scott, and the one set farthest from his native country. Richard Middlemas, a Scottish doctor, leaves his bride-to-be, Menie Gray, and emigrates to India to seek his fortune. There he has an affair with an adventuress, and schemes to bring Menie across to India in order to ‘give’ her to a local prince, who has seen a portrait of her and fallen in love with her. Menie is rescued by a suitor she refused in the past, who arranges for the blackguard to be crushed by a passing elephant. Meine, however, does not marry her saviour, and, once he is dead, remains a spinster to the end. Scott here has no historical axe to grind; he is interested only in painting a picture of unwavering loyalty and dignity to contrast the abject figure cut by the doctor, the woman’s husband. Often accused of repetitiveness and of having by now run out of imagination, Scott seems here to be endowed with a visionary imagination that foreshadows Kipling or Orwell, though he had never been anywhere near India. 8. True to form, with the mediocre Fair Maid of Perth (1828) Scott resumed the well-tried formula of a plot filled to the brim with twists and turns such as make it one of his most unreadable and unpalatable novels. At the end of the fourteenth century, the son of the king of Scotland makes a botched attempt to kidnap Catharine, a burgher’s daughter. He is prevented from carrying out his evil plan by an armourer, equally skilled in making weapons and in wielding them. He does not obtain Catharine’s hand in marriage as a reward for saving her, though her father favours the union. Later, a cavalry captain, chivalric only as regards the name of his regiment, kills the king’s son in an ambush. A third suitor for Catharine’s hand is a Highland warrior called Conachar, so that the plots ends up by becoming yet another case of conflict between opposing political beliefs. Two clans face one another in two formations of thirty men each. In the

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fighting between the leaders, Conachar is seized by an attack of cowardice and commits suicide. The mediocrity of Castle Dangerous (1831) is attributed by some to the effects of Scott’s first stroke in 1830, and is considered almost unanimously to be one of his most forgettable works. The year is 1306; an English castle is under siege by the Scots, and a beautiful Lady Augusta promises to marry Sir John, the defender of the stronghold, if he can resist for a year and a day. She is arrested as a spy by the Scots, and is offered to the English in exchange for the castle, but the English king orders that the castle be surrendered, and the lady marries the man she is betrothed to. Count Robert of Paris (1831) describes the arrival of the first Crusaders in Constantinople and at the court of the Byzantine emperor, Comnenus, at the beginning of the twelfth century. Scott unwittingly ends his career where he started, in the world of chivalry and the Crusades. Once again, a historically accurate political plot is interwoven with a largely invented story of individuals, in this case, the French count, Robert of Paris, and his amazon-like wife, Brenhilda. What provides the propulsive energy for the conflict is the count’s gratuitous insult to the emperor, which brings about a firm reaction from Hereward, a Saxon soldier who has fled to Constantinople after the Norman invasion of his country, and enrolled in the imperial guard. As in Ivanhoe, Scott takes no great pains to conceal his sympathy for the Saxons and his dislike of the Normans. Later in the century Charles Kingsley was to commemorate the daring and chivalry of a different Hereward.39 In Count Robert of Paris, too, the representative of the Saxons is forced to give way to the Normans, but remains, in one sense, the winner: Hereward discovers that the Countess Brenhilda’s maid-in-waiting is, in fact, an old flame of his called Bertha, like so many of the devout, heroic femmes fatales to be found in English romance of all periods. This reunion in part makes up for what he has lost to the Norman master-race.

39

Volume 5, § 156.

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§ 212. Mary Shelley* Not all literary historians dedicate much space to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851), the daughter of Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft (who died a few days after giving birth to her) and wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Some recent textbooks limit themselves to a fleeting reference, while others spend a few more words to honour a writer who, in the past fifty years, has returned to the limelight, and has become the object of academic curiosity. She is credited with prophesying, in her Frankenstein, audacious experiments in the field of biology, chemistry and genetic engineering that were to take 200 years to be actually carried out. At the same time, she issued a warning on the nefarious boomerang effect produced when science is divorced from ethics and the scientist becomes a god. The roots of Mary Shelley’s work are, inevitably, to be found buried deep in her own life experience. She disliked, and was disliked by, her step-mother. She worshipped her father, who had, however, to divide his attention among a number of children and stepchildren, and did not hesitate to send the fifteen-year-old Mary off to Scotland to stay with a Dissenting family. When she returned to London, she met Shelley – at the time, one of her father’s followers – and immediately fell in love. Soon she 1

*

Novels and Selected Works, ed. N. Crook, 8 vols, London 1996 with four more supplementary of Literary Lives and Other Writings, London 2002; Collected Tales and Stories, ed. C. E. Robinson, Baltimore, MD 1976; Journals, 2 vols, Oxford 1985; Letters, ed. B. T. Bennett, 3 vols, Baltimore, MD 1980–1988. The numerous editions of Frankenstein include the one in Three Gothic Novels, ed. P. Fairclough, introduction (7–34) by M. Praz, Harmondsworth 1968. M. R. G. Grylls, Mary Shelley: A Biography, London 1938; M. Spark, Child of Light, London 1952; R. Florescu, In Search of Frankenstein, Boston, MA 1975; The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel, ed. G. Levine and U. Knoepflmacher, Berkeley, CA 1979; W. R. Veeder, Mary Shelley and Frankenstein: The Fate of Androginy, Chicago, IL 1986; A. K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters, New York 1988; E. W. Sunstein, Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality, Boston, MA 1989; The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein, ed. A. A. Fish, A. K. Mellor and E. H. Schor, New York 1993; Critical Essays on Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. M. LoweEvans, New York 1998; Mary Shelley in Her Time, ed. B. T. Bennett and S. Curran, Baltimore, MD 2000; M. Seymour, Mary Shelley, London 2000; The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley, ed. E. Schor, Cambridge 2003.

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found herself pregnant, and, from 1814 on, she was the poet’s constant companion and from 1816 his wife. She must have been traumatized by the unrelenting display of sexual promiscuity by Shelley, Byron and her step-sisters, so that she developed a yearning for true, chaste love; what she got, instead, was a series of pregnancies that resulted in three out of four children coming into the world stillborn. From this harrowing experience derives her life-long, existential meditation on motherhood and fatherhood – or stepfatherhood, since she had ample experience of unreliable and untrustworthy fathers and husbands. At the other extreme, her short story, Matilda (1819–1820), about an incestuous relationship between a father and his daughter,1 exudes a sense of disgust and repulsion for sex and procreation. Mary Shelley’s proposed solution to a problem which was to reach the height of topicality fifty years later was not a society without father-figures – a matria – but a family in which husband and wife have equal rights and duties. She argues not revolution but reform. After Shelley’s death, Mary masochistically defended his memory, claiming he was in no way responsible for Harriet’s suicide, and making great show of lovingly preparing his works for publication. In her, Shelley’s burning optimism was undermined by an awareness of the degeneration inherent in human affairs. Frankenstein is a metaphor of the crisis created within the Enlightenment by irrational currents by then underway. The internal time-frame is some time in the eighteenth century, presumably between 1770 and 1780. Frankenstein is a student at Ingolstadt, where an order of ‘Illuminati’ had been created in the very Catholic environment of Bavaria to counter a revival of magic and alchemy. Heedless of the warnings issued by his teachers, Frankenstein labours in the footsteps of Albertus Magnus, of Agrippa and Paracelsus.2 The monster he creates is loving, but begins to hate when he sees himself rejected by all who come into contact with

1 2

See the extensive introduction to the Italian translation, ed. M. Billi, Venezia 2005. The simultaneity with Shelley’s The Cenci needs no underlining. In England, the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century marks a sharp rise in scientific scepticism, hostile to all forms of magic and alchemy. The experiments in chemistry carried out by Davy and Dalton are an expression of this new spirit.

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him. Clearly, this is an updated version of the myth of the noble savage corrupted by a degenerate ‘civilized’ society. The Miltonic creature longs for communion with his creator, and, when spurned, begins to plague him. A Turkish merchant is imprisoned on account of religious prejudice. The novel also symbolizes the collapse of the new world promised and announced by the French Revolution. At one point, Frankenstein’s hubris is described as ‘a fit of enthusiastic madness’. The narrator, hidden though he/she is, sympathizes with Frankenstein, but then fills him with bitter repentance and hurries him away on his path to self-destruction. The secondary title, ‘or the Modern Prometheus’, suggests that Mary Shelley at first believed instinctively in the possibility of self-divinization. The course of events recounted in the story, however, gives the lie to this illusion and the Promethean tag becomes tragically ironic. 2. Frankenstein was published in 1818, but was written during 1816, the ‘year without a Summer’ spent in Geneva with her husband and Byron. To while away the time, they would read ghost stories, and agreed, half in jest, to each write ‘a tale of the supernatural’. Mary’s was the only one to be completed. This extemporaneous, spur-of-the-moment origin of the novel is all the more extraordinary when one considers the scientific and philosophical implications of the events related, patently influenced by such contemporary work as the experiments on the resuscitation of dead bodies carried out by Erasmus Darwin and Galvani. Born during a waking nightmare, Frankenstein might be seen as a special kind of epistolary novel: awkward and lumbering like few others, it nonetheless paves the way for the diegetic acrobatics of Emily Brontë – who does, indeed, seem to have been influenced by it – and to the odd entanglement such as can be found in Dickens or in Thackeray (who generally use the mode of the omniscient narrator). Frankenstein is the end-product of a variety of materials, arranged so as to interlock or overlap – a construction technique that seems to look ahead to Wuthering Heights. In the published format, the 1831 preface is placed before the 1817 one and others that recount the genesis of the story from different points in time. In the 1831 preface, the author tones down her (justified) pride at having made something so great when she was so young; she also expresses her satisfaction at having risen to the challenge of honouring the memory and expectations of her famous parents. Her

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husband, too, she says, has unceasingly urged her on to greatness. ‘Poor Polidori’ is treated with condescension. The external inspiration is identified in Burke’s sublime: the objective is ‘thrilling horror’ deriving from the contemplation of one who mimes, and mocks, the mechanics of creation itself. In reality, Mary Shelley confesses that she has created a monster, and that the story itself is a metaphor of an act of creation, conveyed through the images of body parts, ‘portions’ and limbs of text, put together round a ‘core’. Mary had an excellent knowledge of Italian, so the assonance of English ‘core’ with Italian ‘cuore’ (‘heart’) would not have escaped her. The child of the writer is sent out into the world. The frame – a mysterious, fantastic scene of great visual impact – disorients the reader with an unexpected sequence of four letters, written to his sister by Walton, a sailor or explorer. He is on a scientific expedition – the year is not specified, but it is some time in the eighteenth century – from Archangel to the icy wastes of the Arctic Circle. Walton is a watered-down version of Frankenstein: a utopian Illuminist, a modern-day Ulysses heading for the land of enlightenment, minister of a science at the service of mankind. He is looking for the North-West passage, the short route to North America. After all, maybe he is a modern Prometheus. As he travels further north, Walton catches sight of two ghostly dog-sleds, one in pursuit of the other. The scene is weird; even grotesque. Exhausted by the insane hunt, Victor Frankenstein is taken on board and dictates his memorial to Walton, who writes it down. The chain of narrators becomes the following: Walton writes letters to his sister, then transcribes Frankenstein’s account, in which the latter inserts the story of the monster who is chasing him. So, two prefaces are followed by the beginning of an epistolary novel, in which the unit of measurement is, of course, the letter. There follows a memorial traditionally subdivided into 24 chapters. The reader is made aware of preceding events with the predictable problems posed by ongoing mimesis, as in all epistolary novels. In Wuthering Heights Nelly’s history of the family of the Heights is so long that it is split into several sessions to achieve greater verisimilitude. The last chapter in Frankenstein ends the memorial, and the novel closes with several unnumbered letters written by Walton. Over everything hangs a sense of claustrophobia created by the walls of ice that flank the ship on its south-bound journey.

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3. Geneva is the Edenic cradle; Frankenstein’s mother’s maiden name is Beaufort (and, therefore, ‘fort beau’); the surname, Frankenstein, suggests the hardness and solidity of a rock; his given name, Victor; Frankenstein’s bosom friend is Clerval,3 and the place where our protagonist was born is Belrive. Most characters, and some places, are given semantically charged names; only the ‘creature’ of Frankenstein is unnamed: he is referred to by various appellatives, but has no name to call his own. At first he is called a ‘daemon’, meaning both a ‘devil’ and a spiritual being of indeterminate form; then he is given a range of synonyms like monster, spectre, creature, and others. The author is strangely sparing in details about the steps that lead Frankenstein in Ingolstadt to discover the life principle and the way to create it. Time and again she uses the word ‘animate’, with symptomatic semantic shifts: the monster re-animates a girl who has fallen into a river, so that the created now becomes a creator. On board the ship, Walton reanimates and revives Frankenstein, who is shocked back into life on hearing that the monster is not dead and continues to give chase. The creator is threatened by his creation; he, who was master, has become a slave; roles are reversed, power is handed over by the creator to his ‘daemon’, who is pursued, and in the pursuit sows the signs of his presence. Frankenstein is in the relentless grip of the monster’s demands – ‘Give me a mate and I will cease to torment you’ – thus becoming Satan and a new Adam at the same time. The duel on the mountains of Savoy creates the scientific threat of a creature that is mightier than its creator; the spirit of Milton hovers over these pages. Unconvincingly, the Dionysian ecstasy of creating life out of death seems to leave Frankenstein all of a sudden; just as on Mont Blanc the two rivals first fight, Frankenstein agrees to sit down in a mountain hut and listen to the monster’s story. Again: in the episode of the idyllic family of Felix and Agatha, Safie and the monster attempt to learn French through imitation; the monster becomes so proficient in the language that his style is indistinguishable from that of Frankenstein and Walton. Everything happens too quickly: Volney’s Ruines are read both as a linguistic exercise and in order to introduce into the text the pessimistic

3

Clerval is, as a character, an example of hard, outward-looking work.

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vision of history. These feats of the monster’s are a synthesis of the intellectual evolution of the savage as child, who acquires all his knowledge from Werther, Plutarch and Milton. The style is featureless, impersonal, like Scott at his most formal, Latinate and academic. All the characters, including the internal narrator and external author share the same stiff, conventional language. 4. After her husband’s death in 1822, Mary Shelley returned to England with her only son, Percy Florence, and began writing furiously, not least because she needed money.4 She edited the first edition of Shelley’s poems, essays and letters; she wrote biographies and, especially, novels, not to mention a second book of ‘wanderings’ in Germany and Italy, completed in 1844. In Valperga (1823), a historical novel set in fourteenth-century Italy, a well-intentioned young man from Lucca turns into a Machiavellian tyrant. In The Last Man5 (1826), an epidemic wipes out the human race in the year 2100. In Lodore (1835), a father sends his young daughter to live in the uncontaminated natural surroundings of Illinois. Mary Shelley also published in the annuals, popular magazines with a wide circulation abounding in illustrations. Born and raised in the heyday of English Romanticism, she found herself facing the sullen ostracism of a society that was already practically Victorian. She never managed to shake off the air of scandal that was all she had left of her glorious past. § 213. Polidori The ghost-story writing competition entered into by the inmates of Villa Diodati in Geneva produced, along with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a story by Byron’s personal physician, John William Polidori (1795–1821). The Vampyre was attributed by some to Byron (among them, Goethe, who admired it). Byron admitted that the ‘background’ of the tale was his. It was wildly successful in Germany, and found many imitators and arrangers, among them composers like Marschner (Der Vampyr, 1828). In his short life (he died at the age of twenty-six) Polidori wrote a lot more than the work 4 5

Shelley’s father gave her a monthly pittance on the condition that she abstained from writing a biography of her husband. See G. D’Elia’s lavishly annotated edition of L’ultimo uomo (Napoli 1996).

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by which he is remembered: medical and philosophical treatises, poems, a Miltonic epic, travel notes and plays (his Ximenes is worthy of some note), as well as a very long story based on a certain Ernestus Berchtold, ‘or, the modern Oedipus’ (1819). His diary was published by a relative of his, William Michael Rossetti, one of his four Rossetti nephews. Polidori was the son of Gaetano Polidori, secretary to the famous poet, Alfieri. Loved and loathed by Byron (with whom he fell out), deep in debt, Polidori returned to London and committed suicide by drinking a poison of his own concoction in 1821. The Vampyre, written in 1816 and published in a periodical in 1819, is an imitation, reincarnation and parody of Byron at his darkest and most Satanic. It may have been Polidori’s way of avenging himself on his friend for the humiliations he had endured at his hands. Set in London, Rome, Greece, then London again, it makes no attempt to recreate the genius loci; there are no allusions to Slavic folklore at all. More to the point: vampirism is a metaphor for the right of a lord, and indeed a whole aristocratic class, to shed blood, both literally and figuratively. Polidori lays the first brick of an edifice that will soar to the heights of Bram Stoker’s Dracula by way of the mid-nineteenth-century female vampire represented in Le Fanu’s Carmilla. 2. The vampire, Lord Ruthven, scours the salons of fashionable London, freezing those he looks upon with his penetrating eye. He seeks out, especially, women with silken skin and peach-smooth cheeks, desirous to possess them. The ‘deadly hue’ of his face is, of course, a reference to his anaemia and, consequently, his thirst for blood. He meets Aubrey, an ingenuous young orphan, who observes the strange behaviour of his new acquaintance: he is generous towards the dissolute, but his generosity becomes a curse for those who accept his gifts. At the gaming table he loses to card-sharps but ‘milks’ the needy and the honest down to the last penny. In short, he delights in leading the virtuous astray and making their lives a living hell. In Rome, Aubrey, who has joined his entourage, attempts to stand in the way of the evil lord, and save the girl at present in his sights. So far, Polidori’s story reads like a noir version of Byron’s imminent Don Juan: a dissolute libertine is accompanied wherever he goes by a Leporello, or Pedrillo, or, in this case, an honest young nobleman who tries in vain to make the other see the error of his ways and lead him back to virtue. They

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arrive in Athens, where they find Ianthe, a quintessentially chaste virgin. It is from her that Aubrey hears of the existence of vampires that feed on the blood of unsullied maidens; one of these monsters, she says, bears a remarkable resemblance to Ruthven. Aubrey does not believe such nonsense, and laughs it off, but later, during a storm, he shelters in a hut where the heart-rending cries and the sight of young Ianthe with bleeding neck and the teeth-marks still fresh on her skin convince him, too late, of the truth of the report he has heard. However, for now, Aubrey only suspects Ruthven of being a vampire, so the two of them set off again together on their travels. They are set upon by brigands, who shoot and mortally wound Lord Ruthven. He dies after making Aubrey promise never to reveal what he knows of him. The finale is all ghostly Gothic: in London, the dead vampire comes back to life and begins to stalk Aubrey, reminding him at every step of his oath of silence. In the end, Aubrey realizes the resuscitated Ruthven is none other than his sister’s mysterious husband-to-be when he sees his portrait in a locket belonging to her.1 All attempts to warn his sister of the true nature of her lover are vain, and Aubrey dies after writing to her guardians for help. Too late: they arrive to find that the bride has already ‘quenched the thirst of a vampire’.2 § 214. Southey* Robert Southey (1774–1843), the most erudite, encyclopaedic and prolific writer of his day, is largely, and, one might say, systematically, ignored 3

1

2

*

Aubrey at first only suspects that Ruthven is Ianthe’s killer, but realizes his suspicions are founded when he sees that the dagger discovered on the scene of the crime fits perfectly in a scabbard contained in a chest belonging to the dead man. This erotic metaphor is frequent in Byron. That he himself is not safe from the vampire’s blood-thirst is clear when, in the cottage in Greece, Ruthven squeezes his throat, and in London Aubrey loses weight and becomes emaciated. Irate at not being able to prevent his sister from marrying Ruthven, he bursts a blood-vessel and bleeds to death. The Poetical Works, ed. the author, 10 vols, London 1837–1838; anthology editions, The Poems of Robert Southey, ed. M. H. Fitzgerald, Oxford 1909, and Robert Southey: Poetical Works 1793–1810, ed. L. Pratt, 5 vols, London 2004–2012. Prose

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in most surveys of nineteenth-century literature. It seems to be taken for granted that he is historically dead and done for: even in academic circles, his opera omnia is unread, and his principal poems, long as they are, are to be ‘dipped into’ rather than savoured from beginning to end. This advice seems to have been followed by the publishing world, too, so that there is no more recent edition of his complete works than the ten volumes that appeared during his lifetime (anthologized in 1909). 2004 saw the publication of a substantial, but still incomplete, edition of his works. Demoted as an author of long poems, Southey has been rehabilitated, instead, as an excellent writer of short poems and ballads, a master of prose, and first-rate biographer, columnist and polemicist, epistolographer1 and editor of the works of other poets, like his fellow-Bristolians Chatterton and Cowper. He even wrote a curious, idiosyncratic ‘Notebook’ (of which more later) that runs the length of several volumes. As with every mistreated writer, it is important to see the other side of the coin: above all, the reader should forget, or, at least, beware of, Byron’s pronouncements on Southey,2 especially because the former far outweighs the latter on the poetic scale. The result of prejudice of the kind expressed by Byron is that Southey has not been given the acknowledgement he deserves as a creative writer, and has been pushed to the margins of literary history. The ostracism of Southey began with Emerson’s disingenuous exclamation to Savage Landor: ‘Who

not collected in a single edition; selection of letters, ed. M. H. Fitzgerald, London 1912. J. Simmons, Southey, New York 1945; G. Carnall, Robert Southey and His Age: The Development of a Conservative Mind, Oxford 1960, and Robert Southey, London 1964; CRHE, ed. L. Madden, New York 1972; K. Curry, Robert Southey, Boston, MA 1975; E. Bernhardt-Kabisch, Robert Southey, Boston, MA 1977 (with a useful, close commentary, updated and partly enlarged in ); M. Storey, Robert Southey: A Life, Oxford 1997; Robert Southey and the Contexts of English Romanticism, ed. L. Pratt, Aldershot 2006; W. Speck, Robert Southey: Entire Man of Letters, New Haven, CT 2006. 1 2

Southey’s masterpiece in this field is The Letters of Espriella (1807), which, using the same rhetorical device as Montesquieu in his Persian Letters, casts a satirical eye on the whole of English society. § 204.5.

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is Southey?’ Traditionally, the position of Poet Laureate was awarded to a dull, rather stupid poet, or at least one that shone for nothing but staid conservatism. In 1813 Southey seemed to fit the bill. In 1830 he was attacked by Macaulay for pointing out the damage done by industrialization and the superiority of the feudal, agricultural society of ‘olde England’, as praised by Cobbett. Macaulay believed that industrialization and the rise of the middle class had favoured progress and brought enormous benefits to humanity. The ‘intelligentsia’ were particularly disturbed by the speed of Southey’s political metamorphosis. His play, Wat Tyler, on the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, came out belatedly in 1817, much to his embarrassment, since it had been written at a time when Southey was an enthusiastic supporter of the ideals of the Revolution. While still alive, he was appreciated as a poet by literary heavyweights like Macaulay himself, Carlyle, Newman, Scott, Shelley, and even Byron; but this did not last, and he ended up, as I have said, on the sidelines of the literary playing field. And yet, he had all the prerequisites of a great Romantic poet: natural eloquence, great metrical skill, vast knowledge, physical strength and stamina, an all-too fervid imagination and ambition to succeed. With all this, he failed to bring forth the masterpiece that would have ensured undying fame. He was unable to govern the fruits of his imagination; he filled his pages with improbable, oneiric adventures, and as for ideas, they were mostly commonplace and lacking in the inevitability of genius. He also suffered from a kind of ideological irresolution which led him to reticence or objectivization. He may rightly be called a ‘near-Romantic’, one who has not taken the final step towards an introspective, symbolic form of poetry; or he may have gone further, skipping Romanticism altogether and landing in Romantic Biedermeier, in the midst of the ethics, aesthetics and praxis of Victorianism tout court. Many aspects of his life story go to support this interpretation: he was a model father and husband; he was always ready to help his fellow-men, especially the unfortunate family of spendthrift Coleridge. He died an old man, brushed by the wing of dementia,3 looking after his wife when she lost her mind, though he himself, at the same time, mourned lucidly 3

When left a widower, he married the mediocre poet Caroline Anne Bowles, with whom he had corresponded for twenty years.

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the deaths of two sons. Southey’s turncoat politics was already fading into oblivion as he headed towards his nadir during the age of Decadentism.4 Today, at a time when political correctness vies with each man’s right to change his mind and even contradict himself, Southey is somewhat less of a black sheep than he was. He has recently been defended: he became a Tory, admittedly, but an illuminated one; he disapproved of the Reform Bill, but thought that the nobility had the duty to bring out a programme of political and social reforms, to remedy the nefarious consequences of the Industrial Revolution. An out-and-out Anglican, he was, nonetheless, attracted by the Catholicism he berated;5 an imperialist who stood firm on the rights of Catholics and the Irish, but bellicose towards the French during the Peninsular War. 2. Southey had a difficult childhood: his father, a cloth merchant in Bristol, went bankrupt, and died (perhaps by his own hand); the boy was brought up by a dictatorial old aunt. As an adolescent, he attempted to hide his fragile, neurotic temperament, and suffered greatly from nightmares and hallucinations during which he imagined himself attacked by ghost and demons. As a child, his favourite authors were Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ariosto and Tasso (in English), and Spenser, and they can be seen in the works of his maturity, which often involve a hero and his epic struggle with some diabolical force, usually resulting in the defeat of evil and the victory of good. He was expelled from Westminster School – rather like Shelley from Oxford – for protesting in the student journal against the use of corporal punishment in schools. He went to Oxford, but did not take the degree that was to open the door to Holy Orders, abandoning his studies after only eighteen months. But he did meet Coleridge, and fell under his spell. As we have already seen, the two friends joined forces to create the blueprint for Pantisocracy, the utopian colony they planned to found on the banks of the Susquehanna River in America. They ran out of money and attempted to raise cash by giving public lectures. A play on Robespierre was published under the name of Coleridge but was, in fact, a 4 5

The most acrobatic, contortionist defence of Southey is to be found in the chapter dedicated to him by Saintsbury in CHI, vol. XI, 153–71. Bernhardt-Kabisch 1977, 58–9.

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joint production. A poem on Joan of Arc (1795) was parodied in the conservative paper, the Anti-Jacobin.6 So, by 1810, or, rather, 1803, Southey was a leading voice in English radical literature, and two collections contained militant protest poems on the most controversial issues of the day, including slavery. At the same time he was toying with the idea of the legal profession, but was spared by a wealthy friend, who made him an annual allowance of £160. He went to Portugal with an uncle, chaplain to the English mission there, and, thanks to this fortuitous experience, became one of the greatest and most prolific experts in Portuguese and Spanish literature of the century.7 In 1803, he settled down for life in Keswick (in the meantime he had become Coleridge’s brother-in-law). This year marks the beginning of Southey’s political and ideological ‘de-conversion’ and the passage from an early, Titanic, utopian Romanticism to a second, more restrained phase. He realized he could not aspire to becoming the third ‘Laker’, although he lived in the district that had given birth to that particular ‘school’. 3. The question that springs to mind regarding Southey’s four main poems, completed and published by 1814, is, why he wrote them; what pressing, personal need moved him? The seeds lie in his time at school, as we have seen (Picart’s engravings of mythology and religion, and Gibbon). They owe much, too, to the craze for the exotic that was raging at the time, and several minor continental epics inspired by primitivism (though there was no European alternative to the famous medieval ‘matters’). In a range of disparate geographical and historical settings, Southey stubbornly presents his Pantisocratic dream, the renovation of a corrupt society carried 6

7

The series of revisions is paradigmatic: in the 1798 version the heroine becomes a ‘daughter of nature’, and in the preface to the 1837 edition of his works Southey confessed to believing, at that time, in the palingenetic potential of the American and French revolutions, but subsequently to have had second thoughts (BAUGH, vol. IV, 1160 n. 4, and Bernhardt-Kabisch 1977, 31). In this field, he wrote three large volumes of a history of Brazil (1810–1819), which was to form part of a history of Portugal (it was never written). He translated, or, rather, re-wrote, adapted and expurgated Amadis, Palmerin and, most importantly, El Cid. The Expedition of Orsua; and the Crimes of Aguirre (1821), a tale based on the evil consequences of excessive personal power in an exotic setting, has much in common, according to Bernhardt-Kabisch, with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

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out by a hero who is both destroyer and creator. He wished to épater, by vying with Homer and with Virgil even (his ambition was to poeticize the entire history of mythology and religion in their various manifestations, which he failed to do), and by experimenting with daring new metrical forms, alternating the use of blank verse with the first instance in English of unrhymed vers libre. In actual fact, he was unable to go beyond a rationalistic compilation of documentary material, a lifeless heap of erudition and labour, and, instead of a true poem, just versified prose. In Thalaba the Destroyer (1801), which belongs to his first libertarian phase, a pious Muslim combats a covey of Satanic sorcerers that live in a cave under the sea and keep sending him mysterious tempters and dissuaders. The poem may be seen as something of an allegorical agon against religious fanaticism, but the reader is soon lost in a ceaseless round of often overlapping sensational coups de théâtre, fearsome fights featuring the hero battling against what first appear to be the forces of good but then turn out to be the very opposite, and visits to enchanted pleasure gardens and the temptresses that live therein. Thalaba’s bride-to-be, too, comes and goes; when absent, she still guides him in ordeals that hold back the quest for no apparent reason. The end comes when Thalaba pulls his father’s sword from the flames and routs the Satanic crew. Southey also envisaged writing a great national epic, and needed a suitable subject. For Madoc (1805) he found it in Welsh mythology, Wales being traditionally the homeland of the ancient Celts. By 1805, he had considerably modified his political principles: he intended once again to wage war against superstition, and at the same time revise the ideals of his pantisocracy in the form of an American colony in which Welsh and Mexicans live side by side in peace. Madoc, the legendary discoverer of America three centuries before Columbus, witnesses with horror the human sacrifices required by the local Aztec religion. Southey repeats the mechanism used in Thalaba – a ruling priestly caste that requires the intervention of a destroyer and liberator sent by providence. For the third time, in The Curse of Kehama (1810), preceded by a surge of public interest in all things Indian, Southey presents the dethroning of a despot about to take the final step towards self-divinization (an obvious reference to Napoleon against whom Britain was at war in the Iberian peninsula). In Roderick, the Last of the Goths (1814) – completely transformed with respect

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to the original outline – Southey had reached the point of approving mass murder and generalized repression as a means of restoring the prerogatives of the ruling class, especially after the Luddite riots and the assassination of the Prime Minister, Perceval.8 4. The distance is huge between even just this last long epic and the handful of short poems, or, more precisely, ballads, written at the age of thirty, which are much more famous than the four lengthy works I have mentioned. Of the short ballads, ‘The Battle of Blenheim’ stands out: in spare, unadorned lines, made more effective by the old man’s repeated reference to ‘the famous victory’, the poem recounts an anecdote that shows up all the senseless horror of war. Ballads like this indicate that Southey was outside the sphere of private emotion dear to Wordsworth, and occupied the field of phenomenological objectivization. They also resemble the future vein of Victorian grotesque as seen in the macabre poems of Praed, Hood and the Ingoldsby Legends: a bishop is devoured by mice, the ghost of a dead child appears to haunt its killer, a witch’s coffin is used in a funeral wake.9 Already in 1798, Southey had wasted no time in distancing himself from the Lyrical Ballads in a review in which he defined Coleridge’s ‘Rime’ ‘a Dutch attempt at German sublimity’. But to insist on rehabilitating Southey as a poet is to do him an injustice. We should remember what Hazlitt said of Samuel Rogers, as his words fit Southey like a glove: he decomposes poetry into prose. Saintsbury said much the same thing when he stated that Southey’s poems always make the reader wonder whether they wouldn’t have been better expressed in prose. That prose was a medium Southey could handle well is proved by his letters; with impressive self-confidence he forges his own style, so different to other newcomers to the literary stage – Lamb’s florid, archaic eloquence, Carlyle’s highly individual, new-coinage-packed speculations, De Quincey’s poetic, 8

9

Morally speaking, Roderick is redeemed, because, thinking he has raped Florinda, he expiates his crime by entering a convent, and becomes a priest. One day, Florinda goes to him for confession unaware of who he really is, and reveals things that mitigate his guilt. Praz makes an all too fleeting reference (PSL, 443) to the poet’s return home from Waterloo, with toys for his children, in Southey’s The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo.

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visionary pages. Southey, rather like Hazlitt, adopts a restrained, neutral style, and using this medium writes two exemplary biographies, one of Nelson, the other of Wesley, the latter maintaining an admirable historical objectiveness despite the fact that Calvinism and fanaticism were two of Southey’s sworn enemies. In the Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society (1829, but written by 1820) Southey pretends to be speaking with the ghost of Thomas More; he thunders against Malthus and the utilitarians, and invokes a universal return to order. The Doctor, the ‘Notebook’ referred to above (first two volumes published in 1834, but ready and waiting from 1813) immediately brings to mind Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera, but then, gradually, it turns into a ‘nostalgic, agrarian idyll of the good old days before the eruption of revolutionary modernity’,10 and an early fruit of Victorian self-righteousness, facetiousness, and a bit of nonsense too, to be dipped into while sitting in one’s armchair by the fire. § 215. Landor* Some literary historians lump Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864) along with Hunt and De Quincey to form a rather unlikely trinity. I (and many others, it must be added) see him instead as being closer to Southey, especially in his initial, admittedly lukewarm participation in the Romantic movement proper, and subsequent withdrawal to a more isolated position 11

10 Bernhardt-Kabisch. *

The Complete Works of Walter Savage Landor, ed. T. E. Welby and S. Wheeler, 16 vols, London 1927–1936, the last four of which republished as The Poetical Works of Walter Savage Landor, Oxford 1937. Landor as Critic, ed. C. L. Proudfit, London 1979; Walter Savage Landor: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. K. Hanley, Manchester 1981. J. Forster, Walter Savage Landor: A Biography, 2 vols, London 1869, in one vol., Boston, MA 1869; S. Colvin, Landor, London 1881; M. Elwin, Savage Landor, London 1941, and, enlarged, Landor: A Replevin, London 1958; R. H. Super, Walter Savage Landor: A Biography, New York 1954, 1977; G. R. Hamilton, Walter Savage Landor, London 1960; P. Vitoux, L’Œuvre de Walter Savage Landor, Paris 1964; R. Pinsky, Landor’s Poetry, Chicago, IL and London 1968; E. Dilworth, Walter Savage Landor, New York 1971; J. Field, A Biography of the Writer Walter Savage Landor, plus a Selection of His Works, Studley 2000.

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as a critic, albeit internal, of Romanticism itself.1 The similarities between the two in terms of biography, background and ideology are many and striking. While it is true that after the age of thirty they begin to differ considerably, their literary oeuvre is, nonetheless, almost similar. They were practically the same age; Landor was the son of a successful Warwick doctor2 and a wealthy mother. One might say that the family belonged to, if not the aristocracy, at least the upper classes. The Southeys, too, could boast a coat of arms. Both went to a prestigious public school, and then to Oxford, where, however, they avoided one another. Both had something of the rebel in them and caught the bug of republicanism. Both were expelled for riotous behaviour and insubordination. Both – and this is strange – got involved in the Peninsular War, obviously on the side of the Spanish against Napoleon. Landor went to France and saw with his own eyes the failure of the Revolution; from then on, he hated everything French. As soon as he came into his father’s money, he put together a regiment at his own expense, but then had to disband it and return to England (with the honorary rank of colonel awarded to him by King Ferdinand) when the English stipulated the treaty of Cintra. Thus far, their lives run almost parallel; after about 1808, their paths separate: Landor never abandoned his republican sympathies, and, indeed, took to flaunting them, unlike Southey. Even so, and despite his changed convictions, Southey did join forces with Landor in

1

2

Any comparison with Milton seems to me to be even less acceptable, despite several echoes of Paradise Lost in Gebir. One of the greatest products of the early nineteenthcentury revival of blank verse was the 1814 translation, in this metre, of Dante’s Divine Comedy by Henry Francis Cary (1772–1844). As we shall see below, Landor himself was one of the first to bring Dante back to the attention of his fellow Englishmen. For a brief history of Dante in English before the Rossettis, cf. BAUGH, vol. IV, 1173 n. 48. One of Landor’s brothers, Robert Eyres Landor (1781–1869), who became a country vicar, was the author of several plays, among which one, on a count from Arezzo, was attributed to Byron, and another to Landor himself. He destroyed all copies of three other published plays. Prosodic eccentricity evidently ran in the family, as one of his poems uses a previously unknown metre, blank verse with rhymes scattered here and there.

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supporting various other causes in the future.3 From the point of view of temperament, it is undeniable that Southey was quiet, reserved, taciturn, even cold, while Landor was ebullient, impulsive and quarrelsome. These traits often led to arguments, rancorous controversies and even lawsuits against strangers and even friends and family. On a domestic plane, too, the lives of the two writers soon begin to diverge: Southey was an exemplary father and husband, and for forty years led a life of sedentary labour at his desk; he was also extremely sociable, at least when compared with Landor, who became more and more solitary, unapproachable and misanthropic. In 1811 he married Julia Thuillier, the daughter of an impoverished Swiss banker who lived in Bath. The couple lived together in Italy from 1815 until 1835, first in Como, where Landor defamed Alessandro Monti (wherever he went, he always managed to ruffle someone’s feathers), then in Pisa, where he did not seek and therefore did not find his fellow Englishmen, Byron and Shelley. He went to Pistoia and then to Florence, where he first stayed in Villa Castiglione and later bought Villa Gherardesca (where, perhaps, the stories of the Decameron were first recounted). He went back to England after separating from his wife, but then, in 1858, returned to Fiesole to a frosty welcome from his children. By now poverty-stricken, he was helped out by the Brownings’ almost limitless generosity. Quite apart from these biographical similarities, Landor and Southey became and remained friends,4 though Landor was always distant from the other Romantics, and Southey was a close friend of Coleridge and, to some extent, of Wordsworth too (though not of Byron). The affinity between the two poets became more obvious when they realized they were both working, quite independently, on the same poetic projects and with the same objectives. Thalaba and Gebir are the same kind of poem, and tell, in blank verse, similar complicated

3

4

After 1815, both were militant writers and commentators of political events: Landor wrote against French imperialism, and in favour of the Neapolitan rebels. He also wrote a study of Italian life and customs (1837–1838) and one on the Irish question. He then wrote about the uprisings of 1848 with redoubled vigour. On the basis of his friendship with Felice Orsini, and his support of tyrannicide as a political tool, he was suspected of being involved in the attempt to assassinate Napoleon III in 1858. An epitaph in his memory calls him ‘a friend for forty years’.

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oriental stories of improbable adventures. The two began to develop longlasting mutual respect and attention for each other’s work. In 1843 Southey died, followed, twenty-one years later, by a now venerable Landor. Both were active in the same literary genres – poetry, drama and prose – and in the same chronological order, though their resemblances emerge more clearly in subgenres and new kinds of literature. Both wrote unstageable plays; Landor dedicated two plays to the same Count Julian of Spain that is the subject of a poem by Southey. Both were erudite classicists, but while Southey wrote prose compilations that mostly involved history and were only marginally creative, Landor was more inventive, and distilled the juice of his vast knowledge of modern and ancient literature to make his heady ‘imaginary conversations’.5 Southey continued to write poetry as such, while Landor emigrated to the Alexandrian idyll and never experimented with realism, introspection or the ballad form. So, Landor can be said to have invented the genre of the ‘imaginary conversation’, but something similar exists in Southey, too; Manuel Espriella’s falsetto voice in the first letters from England, and, especially, in the ‘colloquies’ with the ghost of Thomas More being one such example. 2. Landor’s Romanticism, I repeat, is ‘hybrid’: he is a Hellenist, and the most versed in Latin of all the Romantic poets, so much so that he actually composed in Latin and then translated into English and vice versa. He is a classicist to the same extent as Housman a century later, or, we might say, a late, very erudite humanist. Any comparison with the Hellenism of Keats or, especially, Shelley, is misleading. His Hellenist poems present roughly sketched characters and stylized situations that have little to do with reality. He favours short poems, though in massive collections, as opposed to the long epic to which Southey remained faithful for a good fifteen years. He is therefore a miniaturist whose skill lies in incisiveness, density, concision, brevitas, and the sting in the tail, as lethal as a scorpion’s. This means that, out of a vast output (Saintsbury counted 50,000 lines of verse), it is the epigrams, epitaphs and idylls that still live. Like Ben Jonson, Landor was an incontinent, undisciplined Romantic in life style, but sober and 5

Cf., however, JEL, 346, for the history of England to be written together with Southey, and another planned historical work.

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controlled in his art. He might also be compared with Carew and Suckling in his Cavalier harping on the strings of carpe diem, the nostalgia for allenveloping love, and the not unpleasant sense of impending death – infinite variations on the theme, with embellishments from the world of myth. The spirit of Herrick, too, is there, with his wit and jokes and merry scenes (as in the Hesperides). Southey aside, up until the middle of the nineteenth century Landor was, for many contemporaries, a figure of fun, starting with Dickens, who teased him good-heartedly in Bleak House. Hazlitt gave a mixed verdict on him, but the end of the century saw a swing of critical opinion in his favour. His refined poetic technique began to be recognized. Browning appreciated him (we shall see why), and, after his death, Swinburne was (over)loud in praise of all he did. Emerson, Larbaud, George Moore and even Nietzsche were ecstatic in their assessment of Landor’s poetic gifts. Later, T. S. Eliot was unimpressed while Yeats was fascinated, and Pound, hotfoot on Swinburne, pronounced him the most important writer between Pope and Browning. Today the general consensus is that Landor wrote too much, and requires pruning. He remains a niche author for whom there is little demand, and there is still no complete modern edition of his works. 3. Landor began writing in 1795, with a series of satirical poems in the manner of Pope and the first exquisite idylls for ‘Ione’ and a Rose Aylmer (both these affairs ended unhappily).6 There followed, three years later, Gebir, an epic in Miltonic blank verse inspired by a novel by Clara Reeve. Landor’s epic is in seven, rather than the statutory twelve or twenty-four books; the action is thinner, more contained and less digressive than in Southey, who was thinking of writing on the same subject, and indeed did so some years later. The story follows the three phases of the invasion and conquest of Egypt by an Iberian prince called Gebir, and his shepherd brother’s infatuation with a nymph. When read alongside Southey’s 6

Ione, real name Nancy Jones, died after giving birth to Landor’s daughter, and Rose Aylmer fell a victim to cholera in India. Later, Jane Sophia Swift (who did not die young) was loved and celebrated as Ianthe in Simonidea (1806). Dry Sticks (1858) contains verses dedicated to a sixteen-year-old girl he met at Bath, where he spent twenty years, after his Italian period, which ended in 1835. 

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Thalaba, Gebir confirms the suspicion that the English radicals used the framework of oriental myth in order to, among other things, express hidden support for the French Revolution and criticize British imperialism, while not indifferent to the fascination of the archetypal conqueror. Landor, like Southey, was appalled when Napoleon promoted himself consul, and reacted by dashing off a preface to the poem (begun in Latin, continued in English, and translated back into Latin in 1803) in which he quashed any idea of approbation of this authoritarian turn of events. Despite Landor’s political caution, the reception of his poem was, from the outset, disastrous: Lamb mocked it and deformed the title into the word ‘gibberish’; De Quincey boasted that he was a ‘mono-Gebirist’ – in other words, the only person to have read it. Landor’s plays, which Swinburne swooned over, clearly showed that the author was struggling with a genre that was frankly uncongenial to him (as Landor himself admitted). The voluminous, illconstructed drama, Count Julian (1812), was never performed, and is only mentioned because it provided a lead for a poem by Southey (or, perhaps, the other way round). His 1839 trilogy on Queen Giovanna of Naples is even more forgettable. The Imaginary Conversations7 first appeared in 1823 in the London Magazine, and were published in two volumes in 1824, and in five volumes in 1829. Landor revised them incessantly right up to his death, and added other ‘Greek and Roman’ conversations in 1853. They prove that Landor actually learnt a great deal from the fiascos of his plays: he realized he could create riveting single scenes, but was unable to stitch them together to form a dynamic whole. Admittedly, the conversation genre was not an absolute novelty: Lucian, Plato and Cicero had dabbled in it, and, more recently, several English and French writers. But it became Landor’s trademark, and he churned out exemplars in huge numbers. Like Southey, Landor excels, not in poetry, but in prose, and, more specifically, this kind of prose. The complete imaginary conversations number more than 150, and range in tone and genre from the theoretical treatise to the debate, from the tragic to the comic, from the pathetic to the satirical. They

7

The often brilliant conversations are put in the mouths of both historical and invented characters, and are not without some glaring anachronisms.

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usually involve two speakers, but sometimes more; they vary in length,8 as in time and place.9 Starting from Greek civilization, a slight reshuffling of the internal order of the pieces would result in a skeleton history of the human race in its philosophical and intellectual development. In actual fact, Landor ignores the basic principles of dramatic action by telling the reader explicitly which of the conversationalists speaks for him. In all likelihood, the genre itself was thought up to provide some kind of defence for an author who wished to express daring or dangerous opinions. Landor found an imitator and disciple in Browning, with his numerous dramatic monologues (the idea for Filippo Lippi is a case in point). Like Landor, Browning leaves the reader the task of reconstructing the context of the situation from clues inserted in the text; but Browning proceeds to exclude the interlocutor, leaving the monologist in sole possession of the stage (though one is almost always given the impression that someone else is listening, attentive but unseen).10 8

9 10

Among the longest are those between Diogenes and Plato, Lucian and Timotheus, and between Epicurus, Leontion and Ternissa. Epicurus, in turn, reappears in other conversations, and is the philosopher Landor is closest to, while Plato is the most distant from him. The text of a single conversation may include long, elaborate speeches, as well as what is practically stichomythia, as in the case of Hannibal and Marcellus, and Metellus and Marius. Two Italian conversations between contemporaries feature Carlo Alberto with the Duchess Belgioioso, and Garibaldi with Mazzini. This same effective rhetorical ploy is used by Landor in his brilliant Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare (1834), in which Shakespeare is brought before an imaginary court, charged by Sir Thomas Lucy with deer-poaching; and in Pentameron (1837), a rather long-winded dialogue between Boccaccio and Petrarch on Dante, which stretches out over five days. Like many other debatable, or plainly wrong, judgements on contemporary poets, Landor’s pronouncements on Italian ‘Trecento’ authors are personal and arbitrary: Boccaccio is over-estimated and Dante underrated. Pericles and Aspasia (1836) is an imaginary exchange of letters full of discussions on Greek drama, from which Browning might have drawn inspiration for his two Balaustion poems (Volume 6, §§ 14.1–4 and 17–18). Pentalogia (1837), consists of five verse dialogues between speakers of different historical periods (Clytemnestra and Orestes, Luther, Bacon), and is therefore closer still to Browning’s dramatic monologues.

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§ 216. Campbell Thomas Campbell (1777–1844), whose father, of noble origin, had made a fortune importing tobacco, but had been bankrupted by the American war of independence, graduated from the University of Glasgow, distinguishing himself in Classics. He then enrolled in the University of Edinburgh, and, at the age of twenty, impressed Scott with his first collection of poems. He went to London, where he abandoned once and for all the idea of a career in law. He made a living by writing for periodicals and giving lectures. He brought out a biography of Frederick the Great (later eclipsed by that by Carlyle) and edited and prefaced a series of specimens of English poets in seven volumes, rather as Lamb did with his Specimens of English Dramatic Poets. He wrote his best poems before he was thirty, though he was to live for another forty years. Jeffrey and Scott expected more from such a fine, fastidious craftsman, but, for various reasons, he ran out of stamina, interests, and even the will to live. His wife died and what was left of his life was made more tragic by the insanity of one of his sons. By the time he died, in France, he was generally considered to be the third most important Scottish poet of the turn of the century, after the half-Scottish Byron and Scott. His stature is proved by the fact that he successfully competed with Scott for the position of chancellor of the University of Glasgow, and that, in acknowledgement of his eminence as an English, or rather, British, man of letters, he was buried in Westminster Abbey, next to Addison. A mere generation later, his fame began to dim, and in the presentation of his works by William Michael Rossetti in 1871, it is hard not to read, between the lines, traces of condescension mixed with mockery. There is no doubt that Campbell was a key figure in his age of transition: he resisted the lure of the new dawn of Romanticism while feeling cribbed and confined within the limits of classicism. Byron spared him in his early tirade against the ‘bards’ of the day, and Campbell himself continued to be guided by Pope’s principle of ‘correctness’, even though his subjects called out for a free-flowing style more suited to the contents. He wrote a number of poems on Scottish events and personages, without great success, and his Gertrude of Wyoming (1809, on the massacre of a settlement of colonists in Pennsylvania at the end of the eighteenth century) is unanimously held to represent the worst ever use of the Spenserian

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stanza in the language. Campbell is better in the short poem, especially on patriotic or martial subjects, like a concise description of a battle scene, a subgenre in which he equals, indeed excels, Tennyson himself. However, his total output is small, and the short poems of any value can be counted in the fingers of two hands. 2. When it appeared, The Pleasures of Hope (1799) filled a tiny gap between Crabbe and the just published Lyrical Ballads; hence its enormous popularity, short-lived though it was. Its title and type of writing bring to mind the philosophical poems of Akenside some twenty years earlier (another poet, Samuel Rogers, had dedicated a collection of verses to other ‘pleasures’). Campbell’s Pleasures bears the mark of a radical, but a retiring one: he extols the idea of liberty, calls for the liberation of Poland, a country he cared for passionately all his life; he attacked the slave trade, and criticized British rule in India. Immediately after the publication of this work, he travelled to Germany where, on the eve of war, he wrote some of his best-known and loved short lyrics. ‘The Battle of the Baltic’1 (1801) evokes a glorious battle won by the English navy, and was immediately popular in England at a time when patriotic rhetoric was rife. However, Campbell is far from blowing the trumpet of jingoists like Newbold at the end of the century. He is, indeed, a refined poet, metrically proficient, immaculate in style and unimpeachable as regards taste. Some idea of his achievement can be seen in ‘Hohenlinden’ (1803), perhaps his most perfect poem, a depiction of the night before a battle, marked by a rhythm of repetitions in every stanza. The rhyme scheme is aaab, the last line ending always in ‘-y’. The chromatic movement of the poem involves contrast and transition between the purest white, the blackness of the night, and the red of the blood that soaks the snow. Here Campbell might be said to lack poetic vigour, as he contains and diminishes the effects rather than increasing them. The rest of his limited production shows him to have become an ante litteram crepuscular in love with dewy grots and sylvan solitude, who, as a reaction, exalts the ‘heroism’ of warfare. This meditative 1

Not many years after W. M. Rossetti’s edition, Hopkins was writing to two trusty friends about the ‘sprung rhythm’ of a number of lines in this poem, which he admired greatly and started to set to music.

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vein produces the usual, slightly worn moralistic and gnomic reflections, such as the platitude that tempus fugit, and, the nearer we get to death, the slower we wish it would go. § 217. Rogers Citing The Pleasure of Memory (1792), often defined as the last flowering of eighteenth-century poetic diction, Byron hailed its author, Samuel Rogers (1763–1855), as a conservative bulwark, together with Campbell, against the advance of the hated ‘Lake Poets’. This was in 1809, but through the years Byron was to prove unfailing in his deference to Rogers. Ten years later (1818), Hazlitt gave a different verdict, taken up by succeeding generations of critics, whereby he was ejected not only from the highest reaches of Mount Olympus, but from the poetic lowlands too. Hazlitt had asserted, we might remember, that Rogers represented the ‘decomposition’ of poetry into prose. His literary identity fades into his career as a great conversationalist, cultural operator, and grand elector to institutional positions in the world of letters. Nowadays, he has been relegated to the margins of the canon, so that, inevitably, there are those who attempt to overturn Hazlitt’s sentence and turn prosiness – even the slipshod versification of his main work, Italy – into a virtue and a sign of innovation and stylistic daring. Born into a wealthy Dissenting family, educated privately in the London suburb of his birth, Rogers showed, in the above-mentioned Pleasures of Memory, that he possessed the prerequisite of curiosity that served him well when he came to write yet another discursive poem exploiting all the recent advances in the field of associativism.1 At the beginning of the new century he could be found frequenting artists like Flaxman and Fuseli; he also went to Paris with Fox to visit the art galleries. From 1803 he became a fashionable literary guru, receiving admirers and supplicants in his opulent London mansion (as time went by, more and more cluttered with paintings, sculptures, and various objets d’art). In short, he became a little arbiter of contemporary letters. His luncheons rang for half a century with the wittiest table-talk, which was carefully taken down and published by

1

BAUGH, vol. IV, 1169–70, the best concise discussion of the poet.

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Dyce. Roger’s fame and influence was such that he was invited to sit on the boards of several London museums. He famously intervened to restore the peace between writers who had fallen out. He helped poets momentarily in distress – among them Wordsworth and Cary, the translator of Dante – to this or that munificent sinecure. He was not without the saving grace of modesty, and, on being offered the post of Poet Laureate in 1850, declined it, and had it assigned to Tennyson. As a poet, he began with a number of minor narrative poems (one on the expedition of Columbus in 1810, another, in 1813, under the title Jacqueline, a humdrum story of a love that has to overcome resistance) that display some timid trifling with the exotic, the ‘Romantic’ and even the supernatural. He first went to Italy in 1814–1815, then again in 1820, when he visited Byron and Shelley in Pisa. One result of his experiences was Italy (1822, definitive edition, 1834), which enjoyed an unexpected popularity no doubt helped by illustrations by Turner and others in a second, de luxe edition. 52 sections in prose and verse constitute a gallery of picturesque views – something like a modern photographic album. Here Rogers is not tempted to digress into the realm of the sublime, but invents a style of reporting that has nothing of the loftiness of Childe Harold (he deliberately uses blank verse), but is nearer to the tone of Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, though the sprezzatura with which the narrative material is treated, including the current affairs of Italian life, reads like an anticipation of Browning.2 § 218. Moore Thomas Moore (1779–1852) deserves to be remembered on three main counts. He lived a hectic life, full of adventure, a surrogate, in a way, for the Wanderlust of the typical Romantic poet. He possessed an incredible

2

The long journey provides the opportunity for descriptions that are, in general, pleasant enough, though some are verbose and obvious. The traveller moves south down the ‘boot’ of Italy, from the Alps to Bergamo, then Venice, Padua, Bologna, Florence, then on to Rome and Naples. Along the way, the author finds his booklearning mirrored in the places he visits, but also manages to capture the authentic feel of ordinary life and people. This is a more conciliatory version of the classic grand tour diaries. In places, Rogers composes directly in prose.

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fluency and eclectic genius in just about every field of literature where the primary requirements are lightness of touch and a propensity for goodhearted satire (in this sense he is an interesting sociological instance of the exploitation of taste and literary marketing in nineteenth-century England). He was a Catholic but succeeded in overcoming brilliantly what was at the time a ‘disability’. He was the son of a well-to-do Dublin grocer, and was enrolled, at his mother’s insistence, in the best Protestant schools of the city. He was admitted to Trinity College on the strength of a new law that made it possible for Catholics to study there. He took a first degree then moved to London to study law. What he actually did was to publish translations of Anacreon and a first book of poems (1801) under the name of Thomas Little (a self-ironic reference to his height). The poems were appreciated for their potential, but shocked their readers because of the many sexually suggestive scenes. Jeffrey lambasted his second book, containing epistles and odes, leading to a duel fought, luckily, with unloaded pistols. In 1803, Moore had been given an administrative post in the archive section of the Admiralty in Bermuda. He sub-contracted it out, and was back in England by 1804. A few years later, realizing he was about to be arrested for debt and consigned to the Marshalsea, he fled the country, and went to France, then to Italy. He was also charged with fraud, in that the person he had sub-let his Bermuda contract to had vanished with 6,000 pounds of Admiralty cash. He found his way to Venice, where Byron entrusted him with his memoirs, which were then placed in the hands of the publisher, Murray. After Byron’s death in 1824, they were burned at the request of Byron’s wife and sister, who feared that something scandalous might emerge from them. Moore made up for this editorial loss by preparing for print the poet’s letters and diaries, which were published in 1830. He achieved great fame with his books of Irish Melodies (1807–1834).1 He filled to perfection the role of commercial song-writer requested by the market, and was paid handsomely: he earned astronomical amounts, often in the form of advances, and whenever there was a demand for songs, he was 1

Some years before W. S. Gilbert, Moore agreed to write the lyrics for songs by the composer, John Stevenson, who was to Moore what, later, Arthur Sullivan was to be to Gilbert.

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ready, poised to supply them. His lyrics were collected in ten volumes in 1841–1842. But fortune is fickle, and his moment of glory passed; since then, he has been relegated to the position of an author of mellifluous lines, or, rather, as the creator of lyrics for musicians and singers. The time might well have come for a revival, given the current interest in para-literature for mass-consumption, like the lyrics of pop and protest songs. His mixture of sentimentalism, double-entendre and overt sensuality might appeal to today’s audiences. Even Moore’s political engagement, albeit lukewarm, when not inconstant, deserves to be seen with a more indulgent eye today. When still a student in Ireland, he was caught up in the conspiracy of the United Irishmen of Robert Emmet, who was executed in 1803 for leading an unsuccessful uprising in Dublin. Emmet’s death had a profound effect on Moore, who, for years to come, would brood, rather like Joyce, on the concept of treachery and oath breaking, and like Joyce never forgot the last words left in writing by Emmet before he was hanged.2 In London, Moore, like Hunt, wrote satires against the Prince Regent, but after 1810 he appeared to have put away his bow and arrows and chosen to embrace the establishment. The Irish appeal to the verdict issued by Hazlitt, who accused Moore of transforming the wild Irish harp ‘into a musical snuffbox’.3 One moment Moore was putting his signature to denunciations of misgovernment in Ireland (Memoirs of Captain Rock, 1824), the next, polishing off ever more sickly, sentimental song lyrics. Naturally, he knew no Gaelic, and, all things considered, he was found to be generally ‘lacking’. Yet, his poems and songs, inadequate though they were, were the only available vehicle for political protest. While Moore left the Irish discontented, the English, on the other hand, tolerated his toothless protest songs, seeing them as a useful safety valve for subjects labouring under their imperialist yoke. What he wrote was innocuous, and, anyway, was addressed, not to the suffering working class, but to the wealthy. So it would not be exact 2

3

The Irish air, ‘Lesbia Hath a Beaming Eye’, sings of the flashing eyes and glances of a certain Nora, to whom the poet gives the mysterious appellative of ‘Creina’. This suggests that the name ‘Nora’ was extremely popular in Ireland at the time, and might partly explain Joyce’s infatuation with his wife, Nora Barnacle. DEA, 65.

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to say that his political identity and Irishness had been tampered with. At the end of his life, he declared himself a Catholic, while admitting he had lived like a Protestant and thought like a deist. He felt duty-bound to write a biography of Lord Fitzgerald, who, though an aristocrat, had supported Emmet. In 1835, Moore started work on a voluminous history of Ireland. 2. Moore’s poems constitute a set of infinite variations on a single theme: most lament the days gone by in lines of balanced, soft regret. He is a poet of the latter days; in him, nature seems to want to rise pristine after upheaval and catastrophes, as the darkest night is followed by the day. He remembers times of bliss now lost, and abandons himself to nostalgia and to grief. The chords he strikes cause sympathetic resonance in the breasts of the tender-hearted and the romantic. In terms of construction and of style, his poems are little short of perfect, like Latin odes inscribed in marble. No transgression is allowed; the diction is fixed and limited; the rhyming is correct, the adjectives conventional, the syntax smooth and flowing. No rough corners, no steep hills to climb. What is wrong with them is not the form, but the contents – conventional, low-flying, hazy and generally disappointing. Take, for example, one of his most famous poems, ‘Oft in the Stilly Night’, called in title ‘a Scotch air’: before falling asleep, the poet remembers joys and sorrows, vain promises of love, shattered hopes of bygone days; the refrain is tautological, and the similes – the withered leaves on the trees, the deserted banquet – are so stereotyped as to be almost lifeless. His two long poems are certainly well-constructed and gripping as far as the plot is concerned. Lalla Rookh (1817) is the third in order of composition (but not in value or reputation) of the pseudo-oriental tales by minor Romantic authors (Southey and Landor, but excluding Byron). It consists of four stories enclosed in a prose framework; the action coincides with the nuptial procession of Lalla from Delhi to Kashmir. Moore wrote this post-lapsarian allegory expressly to get his hands on an advance payment of 3,000 pounds, but it does contain some jewels: for example, Feramorz, the narrator, is the king of Bucharia in disguise, while the chamberlain, Fadladeen, provides an internal critique that repeats the strictures of the moralistic Edinburgh Review. The four stories are united by a single theme, the search for Paradise, entry to which is often blocked by misunderstanding, deception, treachery and misfortune. In one of the stories, the gate

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to Paradise is opened by the tears of a repentant criminal; in another, the conflict between sexual and patriotic love leads to the deaths of two lovers from opposing camps. Only in the fourth tale does love manage to escape peril. In The Love of the Angels (1823) three angels fall in love with three human women; this proved so controversial that Moore hastily turned them into ‘Muslim angels’. The spiritual leans towards the human, but the yearning turns to dust and the flame of love is extinguished, with few compensations. As a satirical poet, Moore, using the same model as Galt and Sydney Smith, wrote an epistolary saga, in two parts, in deliberately mangled verse, dedicated to the Fudge family, first in Paris (1818), then in England (1835), in which he mocked the mawkishness and literary pretensions of the aristocracy. Like other failed or demoted Romantic poets, Moore, too, found himself condemned to a spell in the purgatory of prose. So, for example, The Epicurean (1827) is a philosophical novel that may have influenced Pater (the philosopher, Alciphron, seeks the secret of eternal life in Egypt, finds it in Christianity and dies a martyr to that faith). Moore’s biography of Byron is one of the best of its kind. § 219. Clare* John Clare (1793–1864), the self-taught, Northamptonshire ‘peasant poet’, as he came to be called, lamented, like his contemporary, Cobbett, 1

*

Major Works, ed. E. Robinson and D. Powell, 5 vols, Oxford 1989–2003; Selected Poems, ed. the first great experts on Clare, J. W. and A. Tibble, London 1965, 1975. Letters, ed. M. Storey, Oxford 1986. Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, ed. V. Cantù and with an introduction by C. M. Bajetta, Milano 2006. J. Wilson, Green Shadows: The Life of John Clare, London 1951; CRHE, ed. M. Storey, London 1973; J. Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730–1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare, Cambridge 1972; E. Storey, A Right to Song: The Life of John Clare, London 1982; T. Brownlow, John Clare and Picturesque Landscape, Oxford 1983; John Clare in Context, ed. H. Haughton, A. Phillips and G. Summerfield, Cambridge 1994; John Clare: New Approaches, ed. J. Goodridge and S. Kövesi, 2000; R. Sales, John Clare: A Literary Life, Houndmills 2002; J. Bate, John Clare, London 2003; L. Conti Camaiora, Themes and Images in John Clare’s Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, Milano 2006; New Essays on John Clare: Poetry, Culture and Community, ed. S. Kövesi and S. McEathron, Cambridge 2015.

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the disappearance of the old rural civilization, destroyed by enclosures and encroaching industrialization.1 The revival of interest in his work at the present time was actually initiated by Blunden, Cecil Day Lewis and Middleton Murry, three conservative twentieth-century poets and critics – significantly classified as ‘Georgians’ – who flourished at the height of the modernist movement or shortly after. As a matter of fact, Clare was one of the last nineteenth-century poets to have his work edited and printed in a form that reflected the precise wishes of the author, and which constitutes the basis for a new appraisal of his poetry in the context of English Romanticism. At the end of the century, Clare was still thought of as a minor regional poet, and was largely ignored by establishment critics. Even during his lifetime, his reputation had plummeted after the explosion of popularity occasioned by the publication of his first book of poems, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery in the same year (1820) as the first of Cobbett’s Rural Rides (presumably, it is just by chance that the titles contain the same adjective). Clare’s father was a farm labourer who delighted in entertaining the village with recitals of popular ballads; his mother, on the other hand, was illiterate. Rather like Hogg and Burns, Clare, though lacking an official education, and tied to his work in the fields, devoured all the poetry he could lay his hands on. His own works were published by Taylor (Keats’s publisher, too), keen to exploit a market initiated by Burns and the less gifted Robert Bloomfield.2 There followed, in 1821, The Village Minstrel, in 1827 The Shepherd’s Calendar, and in 1835 The Rural Muse. The titles give some idea of his thematic range. These four works constituted the canon handed down to posterity (none of the poetry he wrote in the years he spent in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum was included). Like Peacock, Clare had a long life, and his time in the mental hospital produced

1 2

Clare ( JEL, 133) accused Keats of not being a real ‘witness’ of what he described. Clare himself often blamed himself for not being sufficiently ‘local’ ( J. Barrell in PGU, vol. V, 229). He is often compared with this lesser poet, Robert Bloomfield (1766–1823, like Clare, interned in a mental hospital) for the rural subject-matter of his verse. Little mention is made, however, of the later William Barnes (Volume 4, § 213), who seems to me to be much nearer in spirit to Clare.

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about 800 poems. As regards form, Clare is ‘conventional’ in these ‘asylum pieces’, but the contents consist all too often in strange, arcane images that surfaced from his suffering subconscious and made him popular with NeoApocalyptics and surrealists like the early Dylan Thomas. Clare had already been hospitalized in 1837 following a manic-depressive attack brought on by his economic difficulties (he had a wife and numerous children to feed), by the loss of a childhood sweetheart, and by the decreasing sales of his poems. In 1841 he escaped from the asylum, and walked the eighty miles to his home, only to be apprehended immediately and re-interned. His poetic corpus has just recently been completed – about 150 years late – with the addition of material previously published only in excerpts and presenting the editors with the difficult dilemma: to correct or to leave intact a text so full of grammatical and typographical oddities, and so completely lacking in punctuation, as to create considerable problems for the reader. Later editors have respected Clare’s predilection for the long sentence, without punctuation, something like an oratio perpetua, which is also found in his autobiographical prose. The consensus, on the basis of the reception of his poems, was, up to quite recently, that Clare is a derivative or imitative poet. Echoes of Wordsworth and Burns are manifold and documented. From a stylistic point of view, it was added, he is still linked to the eighteenth-century poetic diction of Grey and Goldsmith. In reality, he is an uneven, tentacular poet who appealed to Georgians and NeoApocalyptic surrealists alike. Many critics have pointed to Hopkins and his word-painting when faced with Clare’s love of flowers (he was also an expert in local ornithology). ‘Nature’s Hymn to the Deity’ opens assertively like many of Hopkins’s hymns, especially ‘God’s Grandeur’. The most famous poem by Clare, ‘I am’,3 describes the crumbling and uprooting of the ‘I’ in lines so poignant they might come from some of Hopkins’s ‘terrible’ sonnets. ‘Pastoral Poesy’ is, on the other hand, an ars poetica that states that the image is the source of poetry – the same conviction that Dylan Thomas raises to the umpteenth power, and, of course, one of the articles of the Imagist Manifesto. Self-taught, Clare was a skilful counterfeiter, and, as 3

For Italian readers, Clare’s poem brings to mind Leopardi’s ‘A se stesso’.

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we shall see below, produced a memorable imitation of Byron. Critics and historians have tended to exaggerate Clare’s physical and cultural isolation: he was, in fact, unusually open to all sorts of influences and ideas. Now that we have access to Clare’s entire oeuvre, it can be said that the first half of all he wrote is conventional, while the other fifty per cent is like no one else: it is pure ‘Clare’, forward-looking, private and existential, so much so that he has been enrolled in the ranks of the great English Romantics. Most of the many recent studies concentrate on the ecological aspect of his poetry, and on the overt or latent political overtones of studies of nature: he was capable of writing fiery verses of indictment and protest, and his publishers would often intervene to tone down or delete lines or stanzas that seemed to overstep the bounds of prudence. His London patrons, too, kept him in a metaphorical strait jacket that turned his life into one long gaol sentence. In Italy, not unexpectedly, Clare was, until a short time ago, unknown, unstudied, and untranslated. 2. As if to complicate the work of editors and scholars of the future, the texts of the poems composed after 1837 and 1841 were actually transcribed by the ward nurse. 1873 saw the publication of a first instalment of posthumous verse, and 1901 and 1908 enlarged editions (the 1908 one edited by Arthur Symons). Blunden worked on Clare from 1920 to 1931; in 1935, the Tibbles published the first complete edition of his works. 1979 saw the publication of a manuscript containing poems written between 1820 and 1830. At the conclusion of this long editorial journey, the standard complete works were published in 2003. To define Clare’s poems a lament for the loss of Eden is to risk sounding vague, but Clare himself uses this very phrase time and again. The structural opposition is between the threat of cosmic disaster and the aspiration to liberty and security – liberty, first of all, to enjoy, on all hands, the open country, stretching out as far as the eye can see, while now the fences of enclosures brutally limit the vision. The classic correlative is a cornered bird, like the snipe, whose nest is set at risk by hunters, in one of the most complex and metrically elaborate of this series of poems (see also the one on the badger, surrounded and baited by men who violate thus the sacrality of nature). His second long poem (along with the first, it forms a kind of diptych), The Village Minstrel, is clearly autobiographical, though Clare refers to himself by the name of

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Lubin. Much of Clare’s poetry can be summed up in the desire to stretch out, ‘untroubled’, ‘The grass below – above the vaulted sky’. In The Parish, A Satire, written between 1820 and 1824, Clare comes out in the open and denounces the prosperity of one class which is built on the poverty of another. The parish was the administrative organ charged with the care of the poor; in his poem, Clare strips the masks from the various members of the little community of Helpstone. It may be doubted that The Shepherd’s Calendar is so superior to the two earlier works. Each month of the year is marked by a pleasing picture made up of other micro-pictures, corresponding to panels of genre painting. The style is conventional, except for the odd local onomatopoeic term, and lines that suddenly become musical and, even, phonosymbolic. Child Harold (unfinished) and Don Juan are biting, scurrilous denunciations of hypocrisy written during his internment in the mental hospital: the first, in particular, manifests the qualities and fascination typical of an unfinished work, as it were announcing the coming, sometime in the future, of another ‘stream of consciousness’, this time in prose: it is a spiritual diary, made up of recollections mixed with hymns to the power of love, all couched in sublimely imaginative terms. Don Juan, instead, is a kind of counterpoint, and a misogynistic attack on the institution of marriage and the current sexual morality, as well as a Byronic denunciation of hypocrisy and an all-round onslaught against the English social system. § 220. Beddoes, Darley Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803–1849) is the foremost, and greatest, literary ‘oddity’ of the first half of the nineteenth century. In reality, he could well be moved back in time and placed in the rear-guard of the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, or among the exponents of the darkest version of Gothic. Alternatively, he might be moved forward into the Victorian age, and even be seen as a Decadent, or, incredible as it might seem, the representative of the avant-garde experimentalism of the early twentieth century. But let us leave him where he is, on his own particular ‘bank and shoal of time’. It might, indeed, should, surprise the reader to learn that Beddoes is the nephew of Maria Edgeworth, because he inherited none of her down-to-earth constructiveness, none of her aversion to the exotic

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and the ‘romantic’. The fact is, Beddoes was also the son of the famous, eccentric physician who had had, among his patients, Wordsworth and Coleridge. He came, therefore, from a cultivated, well-to-do family. After studying at Oxford, he decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and went to Germany to study medicine, where he formed a homosexual relationship with a baker whom he talked into becoming an actor. While in Germany, he was involved in the revolutionary uprisings, arrested and forced to leave the country on several occasions. In the end he was given refuge in Zurich. He was left by his lover, and killed himself by taking poison (the last, and successful, of several attempts at suicide). Unlike Clare, Beddoes was never interned, and was no lethargic, sedentary, mild-mannered madman; on the contrary, he was violent, with a tendency towards self-destruction. He was a Storm-and-Stress Romantic with a rebellious streak. Only slightly younger than the other English Romantics, and, like them, uprooted and doomed to wander, he died at the age of forty-six, only ten or fifteen or twenty years later than Keats, Byron and Shelley. Ever since his Oxford days, Beddoes was determined to write for the theatre, and indeed left four plays, started when he was young, not all published immediately, and not all even finished. Thanks to these dramatic pieces, he is considered, more than Byron or Shelley, the most important dramatic author and theoretician of the Romantic age (which is, as we know, undistinguished in drama, anyway). So, intrinsically, he belongs to the category of precocious geniuses who come to nothing. Ironically, it is as a poet that he is remembered, thanks to the extrapolation of a number of songs, soliloquies and sundry passages from plays that were then, and have been ever since, judged to be rambling and unstageable. The preface to one of them draws a distinction between northern and southern dramaturgy, and recommends applying to Shakespeare an aesthetics which is neither Greek nor Aristotelian. His intention was to integrate or substitute Lamb with other ‘specimens’. As it happened, he worked for twenty-five years on Death’s Jestbook or the Fool’s Tragedy to make it presentable to the public. A pseudo-Tourneur story of a victim of injustice that dresses up as a jester to avenge himself on a duke, who is dragged off to hell by a ghost representing death, in the end the Jestbook was neither published nor performed. Conceived in 1825, it was his life’s work, an obsessive, morbid investigation of the Hamletic dilemma

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– existence, or death and its companion, corruption – and it was finally published in Poems in 1851.1 The poetic inlays in the plays, which shock the reader with their insistence on disgusting sights and affronts to other senses, were derived in part from his studies in anatomy (he consulted with Mary Shelley on the subject), in part from the German Romanticism of Tieck and La Motte, and Gothic etchings. When read out of context, they strike one as being adventurous and new – the black crow circling above the carrion on the ground – strange, suggestive images responding to a surreal logic, or lack of it, brilliant flashes preannouncing the Imagism of the future. They often cross the border and enter the territory of light verse, though their ‘lightness’ is laced with touches of the macabre, the weird and the outlandish: characters with names like ‘the oviparous tailor’ act out their parts in situations that savour most definitely of nonsense. A poem on ‘the sale of dreams’ contains a wit and female delicacy that look towards Christina Rossetti. Beddoes’s fixation with death made him a favourite with poets like Symons and Swinburne in the 1890s, and attracted the attention of Bloomsbury and Lytton Strachey.2 2. The first play by Beddoes, The Brides’ Tragedy, published in 1822, was favourably reviewed by the usually ferocious George Darley (1795–1846), an Irish Protestant educated in Dublin,3 who had arrived in London only a year earlier, and turned into a veritable writing machine, compiling texts on mathematics, writing and publishing treatises on art (he was a connoisseur and rediscovered Italian Trecento and Quattrocento painting before Ruskin). He also edited the works of Beaumont and Fletcher. He is usually mentioned together with Beddoes because both are ‘transition 1

2 3

The Beddoes MSS were handed for safekeeping to his friend, Kelsall, then given to Browning for publishing. Browning solemnly swore that, were he to be elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford, his first lesson would be on Beddoes. Just before he died he gave them to his son. They were subsequently lost, but the edition by W. H. Donner, Oxford 1935, was possible thanks to a transcription made by a copyist (BAUGH, vol. IV, 1256 n. 10). ‘The Last Elizabethan’ (1907), in Books and Characters French and English, London 1922, 193–216. Judging by his absence from the list of writers in DEA, the Irish see him as a little too Anglicized.

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authors’ (both suffered from writing anxiety; Darley, too, was often near to madness, and battled with depression and stammering), and both tried, unsuccessfully, to breathe new life into the theatre. Though discerning as a critic, when writing poetry Darley often fell into the very traps he castigated. As a playwright, he wrote partially innovative works on the murder of Archbishop Thomas à Becket of Canterbury (the same subject would be dealt with by Tennyson and T. S. Eliot)4 and on the Anglo-Saxon king, Æthelstan. As a poet, he began in 1822 by blatantly imitating Keats’s Endymion in a poem with the significant title of The Errors of Ecstasie, referring to the ‘wandering’ and the disorientation of a ‘mystic’ who is dazzled by the moon. Dreams, visions, ecstasies and enchantments are the principal ingredients of a number of long poems, written intermittently with pauses, for a total of 500 pages divided into five books.5 Starting from a prose sketch published in the London Magazine, Darley wrote Sylvia (1827), an interminable pastoral tale that turns out to be simply a container for delicate, calligraphic songs which, like those by Beddoes, can be extrapolated and read out of context with a certain pleasure. Darley did not manage to finish Nepenthe (1837), a phantasmagoric journey through exotic lands punctuated by sudden purple passages. Two cantos, out of the three planned, remained unpublished until 1897, so were of no use to the later Spasmodics, Dobell and Bailey. § 221. Keble It is as well to begin by reminding the reader that John Keble (1792– 1866) was, as a student at Oxford, the star of Corpus Christi, rather like Hopkins at Balliol fifty years later. From 1831 to 1841 he was Professor of Poetry in that university, and caused obvious ripples in the history of

4 5

As S. Sabbadini points out (MAR, vol. II, 471), Eliot echoes Darley in the final lines of ‘Prufrock’. The complete poems are edited by R. Colles, London 1908, and two volumes of letters by C. C. Abbott, Oxford 1928 and 1940. Most critics remember that Darley’s mimetic ability proved a trap for Palgrave, who, in the first edition of his anthology (1861), attributed one of Darley’s poems, published anonymously in some periodical, to a seventeenth-century Cavalier poet.

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English ecclesiology after our watershed of 1832. His links with the Oxford Movement will be discussed in the following volume of this work.1 To summarize: his sermon on ‘National Apostasy’ launched the Movement in 1833; in it, he admonished that the Church was not a human institution but a divinely ordered hierarchy. He wrote a number of the ninety tracts that make up the Tracts for the Times, but could not bring himself to cross the Rubicon and convert to Catholicism like Newman. From the early 1840s on, he lived out his life as an exemplary, though uncomplacent, country vicar. This is the first element that links him, at least superficially, with George Herbert; he had already published, in 1827, a book of poems modelled explicitly on Herbert’s The Temple, entitled The Christian Year, a collection of commentaries intended as a guide to the Book of Common Prayer, or, rather, verse meditations on the liturgical calendar, with poems dedicated to each Sunday and holy days of the year. This was followed in 1846 by Lyra Innocentium, which did not meet with the same success, perhaps because it was more ‘Tractarian’, and ‘vitiated’, according to some, by an excess of ‘Marianism’. His other works in prose – meditations, homilies and biographies – add little to the exceptional achievement of The Christian Year. A writer who also happens to be a priest, and in some way resembles Herbert, is bound, ipso facto, to have much in common with Hopkins, too, and Hopkins belongs most decidedly to the Oxford Movement. Keble has been called a descendent of Wordsworth, and even a ‘watered-down Wordsworth’, with reference to the Lake poet’s Ecclesiastical Sonnets (1822), which underlined England’s Catholic past. It is equally true that Keble belongs to a tradition that includes the Wesleys and their followers with their glorious hymns. Of his relation with Hopkins, instead, little has been said. The Christian Year, interestingly, was published anonymously, on tip-toe, as it were, like the poems of Hopkins forty years later; Keble, like Hopkins, wished to hold back his poems and have them published only after his death. Both men lived far from the limelight, almost ‘in hiding’. Hopkins naturally was familiar with the tracts and sermons of Keble,2 who may be numbered among the medievalists who waged war against ‘atomism’, 1 2

Volume 4, § 28. Some of the comments here are taken from my essay MVO.

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identified by Hopkins as the disease of the century, and among the supporters of a theocentric society. Keble saw the period between the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century as the high point of a curve that begins in the Middle Ages and hits the ground in the Enlightenment. In aesthetics, too, he believed in the didactic function of poetry, and, inverting the axiom of Matthew Arnold, his successor as Oxford Professor of Poetry, affirmed that ‘real religion is in striking accord with true poetry’. Above all, Keble anticipates Hopkins in defining the role of the poet as that of the medieval auctor, in other words, the copyist or interpreter of God’s word.3 In concrete, Keble’s religious poetry is centred on the dialogic relationship between the poetic ‘I’ and God. This is however a God who, cold and silent in Hopkins, in Keble responds to his call – a Janus of a God, as in Hopkins, but more often a source of benign power, occasionally dispensing trials; a ‘master’, but, in the end, a God of ‘mercy’.4 Keble frequently employs the image of human life as a stretch of water crossed by a boat and often whipped up by tempests. The underlying allegory is that of the ‘Deutschland’, and a symbolism that reminds us how deep an impression Keble’s words had made on the poet/pupil, Hopkins. Keble and Hopkins, thus, may be read as parallel probings and reflections on the relationship between God and man. § 222. Hemans, L. E. L. The skies of the first half of the eighteenth century were lit up briefly by the meteoric passage of two working-class, self-taught women poets whose 3

4

If this epistemic connection is not understood, Keble’s poetry may seem just worn poetic diction used to convey equally conventional and obvious arguments and symbols. Among the many parallels between the aesthetics of Hopkins and that of Keble are: the reference to Longinus, frequent in Keble, implied in Hopkins; the distinction between the poetry of ‘ethos’ and that of ‘pathos’; the unmistakable ‘aroma’ of each single poet (which Hopkins was to call ‘the taste of alum’). This is the theory argued by M. H. Abrams (The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, London 1960, 144–8, 244), who, however, never mentions Hopkins in the whole book. See, especially, the meditations on Holy Communion and the feast of All Saints. Other echoes are identified in my essay, cited above in n. 2.

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stories have in them something that is truly moving and heroic. The precocious poetic vocation of Mary Leapor (1722–1746), the daughter of a gardener, was discouraged by her family. After ten years of hidden scribbling, she found employment as a kitchen maid in the house of a noblewoman who gave her free access to her library. The daughter of the local rector spurred her to collect what she had written so far, and, in what was to be the last year of her life, the manuscript of a verse tragedy was sent to Colley Cibber in London, but was returned to sender without reply. She died at the age of twenty-four; three years later, the novelist-to-be, Samuel Richardson (at the time, a printer), edited and published an enlarged edition of her complete works, which appear clearly for what they are, a tributary, in style and subject, of the great stream of Pope’s poetry. Her most famous poem is an ‘Essay on Woman’, modelled on Pope’s Essay on Man, obviously in rhymed couplets, which presents a pessimistic, but not maudlin, view of the condition of women in England at the time. Ann Yearsley (1753–1806), also known as ‘Lactilla’ (she was a milkmaid from Clifton near Bristol), was sponsored by Hannah More,1 who insisted on managing her literary activity and interests, to the annoyance of Yearsley herself, who had debuted in 1785, causing quite a sensation in the social and cultural circles of the capital. Lactilla eventually slipped her ‘moorings’ and went on to write works that are nowadays read as examples of a restrained proto-feminism. Two poets, chronologically Romantics, deserve a mention,2 and two others a more extensive presentation (they are just a small specimen of a sizeable array of female writers in the period up to 1830, who have been widely anthologized and are currently the subjects of academic research). Both Hannah More and Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743–1825) were active in the field of pedagogy; the former was the daughter of a schoolmaster, the latter the

1 2

§ 231.1. Three, if we count Mary Robinson (§ 157.1 n. 1). As regards ‘the swan of Lichfield’, Anna Seward (1742–1809), poet, letter-writer and novelist, Walter Scott edited a collection of her poems ‘out of the goodness of his heart’, but confided to his friends that he found her poetry ‘execrable’. For the unlikelihood of a revival of interest in her any time soon, see TLS (17 August 2012, 9).

§ 222. Hemans, L. E. L.

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wife of another educationalist.3 Both taught in and managed schools for girls (though this is disputed in the case of Barbauld), and shared similar ideals, like the abolition of slavery and the extension of education. As in the case of Edgeworth, for More and Barbauld literature had to address problems like education and political and social reform. Barbauld’s range of activity is far greater than any other female author of her time: she wrote children’s stories, edited the poems of Collins, the letters of Richardson and various anthologies. Most importantly, in 1810 she compiled a register of English novels up to the moment of writing, and in 1812 published a lament in verse, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, on the state of the nation. Helen Maria Williams (1761–1827) is the female version of English male Romanticism in its most political and libertarian mode. Her life and works bear the impress of the two revolutions, American and French, and the Napoleonic wars. No writer, man or woman, with the exception of Blake, was so deeply affected, even conditioned, by the events in France. When still very young, Williams wrote verses on the American war, and a poem in six cantos, Peru, on the Spanish conquest of South America. After 1790 she lived for long periods in Paris, where she saw the Revolution at first hand. She wrote a series of letters in which she describes, from a Girondin point of view, the evolution and involution of ‘la Révolution’ as well as the rise and fall of Napoleon: like many other Romantics, as we have seen, her initial enthusiasm gave way to disappointment when, after 1799, it became clear that the promised ‘re-birth’ of Europe was not to come. After 1815 she denounced the restoration of the status quo and the return to regimes dominated by the Catholic Church. 2. Until the very end of the last century, the critical assessment of Felicia Hemans (1793–1835) and Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) has been, at best, condescending, at worst, negative and dismissive: neither was deemed to be a ‘poet’ in the fullest sense of the word – one who makes immortal verses; they were, and remained ‘poetesses’. Of the two, Felicia Hemans was considered the better, while Landon was a lesser Hemans, 3

Barbauld was the surname of her husband, who was of Huguenot stock. Barbauld’s family were Dissenters, hence her flair for self-promotion to counter the discrimination the Dissenters were victims to, also in the field of education.

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linked, significantly, to the almanac genre, a minor channel of popular entertainment with the significant advantage of being inexpensive. If they were mentioned at all, it was as representatives of the not unimportant phenomenon of mass publishing, since both registered phenomenal sales. Landon had the added advantage of being surrounded by an aura of transgression, thanks to her numerous affairs. Successive feminist criticism has changed all this, constructing a canon of women’s writing after Lady Winchilsea and before Elizabeth Barrett Browning in which Hemans and Landon are fundamental figures. Their written work confirms and contradicts, at the same time, the evidence provided by their lives. In practice, it dispels the idea that woman and poet are the same person. Quite the contrary. Both should be read bearing in mind a series of contradictions and aporias. In the present critical climate, Landon might be said to out-class Hemans, since the myth of virginal innocence forever on the lips of her heroines clashes with a secret life of transgression (including a pseudo-lesbian relationship with the wife of Bulwer Lytton). 3. Felicia Hemans, born in Liverpool and daughter of a merchant, believed she descended on her mother’s side from a Venetian family; a real or supposed exotic origin, in this case, Italian, was to become a topos right up to Francesca Speranza Wilde. She published her first poems at the age of fourteen, and was much admired by Shelley. She died in Ireland at forty-two, mourned in verse by Wordsworth and Landor. Her poetry was emotionally and materially fed by two traumas: her father’s desertion of the family, and, in 1818, her separation from her husband, Captain Hemans, who left her with five children to look after. Like Charlotte Smith, from that point on, she wrote primarily to make money for her family. The two events I have mentioned pervade fourteen collections of poems published between 1818 and 1835. Symbols representing abandoned wives and mothers, and the determination to react by writing, are taken from the heroines of mythology and female painting (for example, the Bologna sculptress, Properzia Rossi).4 Hemans also introduced into English women’s poetry the myth of Italy as a ‘matria’, a utopian society completely without fathers

4

Inlaid in this poem is another feminine myth, that of Ariadne betrayed by Theseus.

§ 222. Hemans, L. E. L.

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or any other male figures, for that matter.5 Her fixation on the indestructible love that ties a parent, especially a mother, to her children is expressed in forms that are obsessive, paranoid, fanatical and macabre, such as the ‘Suliot mother’ and the Indian with her dead child in the relative poems. However, as we have seen, Hemans does not portray only ‘good and virtuous mothers’, who sacrifice themselves body and soul to their family and children, but others, too, who avenge their wrongs, punish, and kill – but, in so doing, destroy themselves. ‘Casabianca’ – her most famous poem –6 has led critics to say that that far from being patriotic, it is an attack on the stupidity of war and parental tyranny, so that she might be seen as a female Campbell (as in the anti-war ‘The Battle of the Baltic’). While until quite recently Hemans was considered a ‘correct’ but forgettable poet, today she is being considerably revalued. 4. Letitia Landon, too, known from the beginning of her writing career as L. E. L, kept her family on the proceeds from her collections of verse – five were published in the seven years between 1821 and 1828. She paid for her brother’s education, and looked after her mother when her father, a gunsmith, went bankrupt. The subject of scandal, owing to her numerous affairs with exponents of the literary world, she was forced by this relentless gossip to break off her engagement to Forster, the biographer of Dickens. She married, instead, the governor of a British colonial possession in what is today Ghana, who was charged with the recruitment of slaves. The marriage was unhappy from the start, and Landon died in the African colony in mysterious circumstances. Two months after her arrival, she was found dead in her bedroom with a bottle of prussic acid in her hand; the inquest was unable to establish whether her death was accidental, or – most likely – suicide, or even murder by her husband or his lover. Just as Shelley wrote an elegy on the death of Keats, Landon wrote one on the passing of Hemans, whom she outlived by three years. Both poets, in turn, had celebrated Wordsworth in their writings. L. E. L. was more open in her denunciation of the tyranny 5 6

Hemans, like all the successive female poets (cf. Volume 4, § 216.4) was fascinated by the figure of Corinna, the leading character in a novel by Madame de Staël. Together with ‘The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in New England’, both characterized by a certain ‘epic’ tone.

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of the marriage bed, against which Hemans chafed more discreetly. L.E.L.’s ‘The Improvisatrice’ is an example of true Romantic poetry – a spontaneous outpouring of emotion, of which the poet is the instrument of transmission, like a harp or flute, played upon by the force of feeling. The ‘improvisatrice’ is, of course, Italian, or, to be more precise, Florentine, daughter of that mythic land ‘where the mind’ – so writes L.E.L. in her preface – ‘is warmed from earliest childhood by all that is beautiful in Nature and glorious in Art’. At the same time, poetry tends precociously towards music, or, rather, already forms an artistic Anderstreben, because one of its manifestations is painting. The ‘improvisatrice’ gives an ekphrasis of her painting in a feast in which Petrarch observes the chaste Laura and Sappho who sings to her lute. L.E.L. projects herself in many other passionate and unfortunate female poets, like Erinna, and in archetypal, though over-long, dramatic monologues in blank verse. Hovering over her oeuvre, which comprises a small number of militant poems attacking child labour and the exploitation of workers by the great factories generated by the Industrial Revolution, is the constant theme of ‘ruins’ and the inevitable march of time. § 223. Humorous poets To call Thomas Hood (1799–1845) a ‘mere’ comic poet or, in Lamb’s words, ‘half Hogarth’, is to sell him short: he is a poet tout court, whose speciality happens to be a particularly fantastical, grotesque, slightly crazy version of the ballad, or verse tale, that meanders its way from the pathetic, to the tragic, to the tragicomic, and so on, with occasional echoes of the descriptivism and oneiric-mythological elements of the principal Romantics. Hood creates a network of intertextual references – sometimes used for purposes of parody – which is always carefully controlled and never fully participated in. From time to time, he becomes a poet with a mission, drawing inspiration from everyday happenings, but never actually denouncing social injustice or political skulduggery. Nonetheless, some of his poems – the ‘Song of the Shirt’, in particular – became battle hymns for the Chartists in 1840. The son of a London bookseller (but of Scottish stock, and the author of two novels), Hood did not go to university. He published his first works in periodicals, and in 1821 became acting deputy editor of Lamb’s London Magazine. In the next twenty years he collaborated actively with many other journals, one of which bore his name. Odes

§ 223. Humorous poets

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and Addresses to Great People (1825), written together with his brother-inlaw, Reynolds, the friend of Keats (see below at § 223.2), retains a feel of the eighteenth-century panegyric in its deferent appeals to and praises of influential worthies of the day. Whims and Oddities (1826–1827) is the first of his works with an intriguing title. Various poems in this volume belong to the category of the kind of ballads collected by Bishop Percy, though they gradually veer towards the macabre and repulsive (the cadaver of a certain Mary is stolen by body-snatchers – rather as in Stevenson – and her limbs are scattered here and there, to be used in a variety of ways). This is sacrilegious writing, indeed, but mitigated by being placed in a context of suspension of disbelief, such as is used, with similar effects, in the interpolated stories in Pickwick Papers, which is more or less contemporary. The ballad ‘Faithless Sally Brown’ anticipates Tennyson’s ‘Enoch Arden’, with the addition of the story of the sailor who is press-ganged, leaving his sweetheart desperate and alone. Before too long she finds peace in a manner that would not be contemplated in a novel by Mrs Gaskell.1 The story of the guilt-ridden murderer, Eugene Aram, was soon to be told by more than one novelist. All these ballads, on everyday, trivial subjects, some of them quite unsubstantial, might seem to be dashed off with casual, jerky imagery, and yet they are perfect in both rhyme and rhythm. The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies (1827) (another emblematic title) is an unexpectedly Keatsian (and, therefore, also Spenserian) poem. It is a fine example of sylvan poetry, with a flow of minutely described scenes and lively dialogue between a crusty old Saturn and various elves and fairies. It reminds one of Darley, but Hood is a superior miniaturist. ‘Autumn’ is a demonstration of how humorists tend naturally towards pastiche: it is as if fragments from odes by Keats – not just the Autumn one – had been blended in a melting pot and kaleidoscopically recomposed on the page. Half of Hood’s total output was written in the course of the fifteen years he had left to live, which bears witness to an enormous capacity for work, in spite of his poor health. His mounting debts led him to spend most of the period between

1

The much later ‘Bridge of Sighs’, about a woman who commits suicide, is distinguished by a morphological isotopy consisting in the frequent use of polysyllabic words of Latin origin ending in –ly and –y, conveying the sound of a litany or lament.

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1835 and 1840 on the Continent; this coincided with the worsening of his tuberculosis. Like Scott, he was determined to pay off his creditors to the full, an operation no doubt helped by the pension awarded him by Peel. The ‘Song of the Shirt’ is symptomatic of a humanitarian sensibility that was to gather strength during the Victorian period. The ‘Song’ is an embryonic dramatic monologue by a seamstress that preannounces a more modern protest against the alienating work involved in mass production. ‘Miss Kilmansegg and Her Precious Leg’ is an excessively lengthy mock-heroic, or tragi-comic, poem, with a play of antitheses and bathos reminiscent of Byron; it can also be seen as a satire on vanity, avarice, and social-climbing. 2. In 1816, John Hamilton Reynolds (1794–1852), a clerk in an insurance office who published his first work before he was twenty, met John Keats, whose letters to him were to contain many crucial reflections on his poetics. Hunt considered Reynolds a rising star of English poetry, on a par with Keats and Shelley; his full potential was never expressed owing to a gradual lack of confidence in his poetic gift. He married in 1822, and, at the same time, felt that the time had come to abandon poetry, though he collaborated with Hood on his 1825 Odes and Addresses (see above), after which he wrote almost exclusively prose, and less and less of that, until, finally, bored and depressed, he accepted a position in the law-courts on the Isle of Wight, in order simply to make a living, A veritable literary chameleon, he imitated almost all the current fashions in writing, like Byron’s orientalism and the introspection of Wordsworth and Coleridge. He claimed that his poem, The Naiad (1816) was based on a ballad he heard from the mouth of a young girl in Galloway, while the theme of The Romance of Youth is imagination overshadowed by reality. One of his most significant works is The Garden of Florence, a companion poem to Keats’s ‘Isabella’, both based on Boccaccio. So, Reynolds has a serious side – nostalgic, sensuous, evocative – while the humorist and parodist in him is represented by ‘Peter Bell’, which is not only a spoof of Wordsworth’s ballad of the same name, but a pot-pourri of everything written by the two authors of the Lyrical Ballads. Reynolds included in the many voices he could imitate that of Byron the author of Beppo. 3. Winthrop Mackworth Praed (1802–1839), educated at Eton and Cambridge, was a lawyer, member of Parliament and civil servant in Peel’s ministry until his early death from consumption. He was part of

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§ 224. Lamb

an anachronistic, nineteenth-century school of wit. While still at Eton, his verses had brought him some measure of fame, and at Cambridge he became known as the champion of the kind of poetry that ignored Keats, respected Wordsworth and admired Crabbe and Byron. A preference for Byron implied the influence of Samuel Butler and the comic rhymes and the strange, invented words of Hudibras. Like Moore, Praed is ‘classical’, faultless, precise and unambiguous as regards style. He wrote a number of eccentric, oneiric ballads, among which the most famous is ‘The Red Fisherman’. He ended up writing political satire in verse for a living, although, like Hood, he was too mild and benevolent to strike deep and draw blood, as Hogarth, for example, knew how to do. His melancholy mood, too, is gentle and almost soothing, a far cry, indeed, from Swift’s saeva indignatio. As a love poet, he seems to retreat when real erotic passion raises its head. § 224. Lamb* Near in spirit to some of the great Romantics, Charles Lamb (1775– 1834) distanced himself quite decidedly from others. In literary terms, he belongs with Coleridge (the two were of the same age, and had been 1

*

The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas, 7 vols, London and New York 1903–1905; The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, ed. E. W. Marrs, Jr, 3 vols, Ithaca, NY, and London 1975–1978; Lamb as Critic, ed. R. Park, London 1980. Saggi di Elia, ed. M. Praz, Lanciano 1924 and 2011, Milano 1996. A. Ainger, Charles Lamb, London 1882; J. Derocquigny, Charles Lamb: sa vie et ses œuvres, Lille 1904; E. V. Lucas, The Life of Charles Lamb, 2 vols, London 1905, rev. in one vol., London 1921; E. Blunden, Charles Lamb and His Contemporaries, Cambridge 1933; A. C. Ward, The Frolic and the Gentle: A Centenary Study of Charles Lamb, London 1934; E. C. Johnson, Lamb Always Elia, London 1935; G. L. Barnett, The Evolution of Elia, Bloomington, IN 1964, and Charles Lamb, Boston, MA 1976; V. Randel, The World of Elia: Charles Lamb’s Essayistic Romanticism, London 1975; W. F. Courtney, Young Charles Lamb, 1775–1802, London 1982; F. D. Cecil, A Portrait of Charles Lamb, London 1983; G. Monsman, Confessions of a Prosaic Dreamer: Charles Lamb’s Art of Autobiography, Durham, NC 1984, and Charles Lamb as the London Magazine’s ‘Elia’, Lewiston, NY 2003; J. Aaron, A Double Singleness: Gender and the Writings of Charles and Mary Lamb, Oxford 1991; P. Mathur, Charles Lamb: The English Romantic Essayist, New Delhi 1997; S. Burton, A Double Life: A Biography of Charles and Mary Lamb, London 2003.

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at school together),1 with Wordsworth, whom he admired, though not blindly and acritically, and with Blake, whose greatness he felt in his bones.2 Towards Shelley he was icy-cold, though he got on well with Godwin; he was scathing in his judgement on Byron, enemy though he was of his enemy (Southey). Lamb is proof of what many (famously, Mario Praz) see as the quite rapid decline of Romanticism into Biedermeier, and, at the same time, the demise of Romantic Titanism, replaced by the more bourgeois notes of the idyll and the elegy.3 Lamb was a Londoner, and, as such, had no great love of nature, and cared little about the lakes and Alpine peaks. He was a nomad all his life, but his wanderings were from place to place and dwelling to dwelling within the perimeter of the great metropolis. London was already, in the eyes and imagination of contemporary writers, a nightmare city, polluted, alienating and deadly. To Lamb, instead, it was a huge enchanted land of faerie; a paradise of well-being, and source of infinite variety and delight. From 1792 on, and for the rest of his life, he was a lowly clerk in the East India House; the only time he left London was when he went on a trip to France (he described his impressions in a series of lacklustre, awkwardly phrased letters to his friends).4 Lamb belongs to a large category of English eccentrics, or unclassifiable misfits, who can be shifted forwards or, in Lamb’s case, backwards in time. In fact, he exemplifies a mingling of Sterne’s sentimentalism and whimsicality with the more disciplined rationalism of early eighteenth-century essayists, but also the luxuriant, straggling erudition of the compilers of curiosities and encyclopaedias of pseudo-knowledge, like Thomas Browne5

1

2 3 4 5

Written in the first person and purporting to be by Coleridge, the sketch ‘Christ’s Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago’ contains a description of Lamb himself, partly real and partly deformed. It is one of Lamb’s most inspired sketches, and the first glimpse of Lamb the epicure. They have in common, if nothing else, the ‘praise of chimney sweepers’. PHE, 63–74. Such as, ‘we ate frogs: they were delicious’. Thomas Browne (§ 43) is parodied in the essay on ‘Popular Fallacies’ in the second series of Essays.

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and, especially, Robert Burton.6 He wrote books in which various genres were combined. He turned to no longer fashionable models of writing; as a critic he had ‘split-vision’ (some of his comments on Shakespeare are perspicacious and convincing, others are clearly wide of the mark); as an editor of plays, he compiled an anthology of tit-bits and choice scenes from Elizabethan and Jacobean authors, accompanied by boutades that vary from the insipid to the impertinent, to the very striking.7 Insofar as he is not a Romantic – one might even call him anti-Romantic – Lamb bears a vague resemblance to Peacock, who, like him, places style above content, and employs in his prose the rhythms and verbal exuberance usually associated with poetry. He shows no interest in ideology, philosophy or politics; when he does touch on these subjects it is with tongue in cheek, so that his comments seem to oscillate between the naïve and the reactionary.8 A comparison might also be drawn between him and Thomas Carlyle, as they share a number of stylistic peculiarities, like the direct address to the reader, and the use of archaic personal pronouns and

6 7

8

Praz (SSI, vol. I, 57–69) cites much earlier Italian authors, which could not possibly have been Lamb’s ‘precise source’. Several prose works by Lamb deal with the theory and practice of communication in drama, using often specious arguments. Speaking of Restoration theatre, he states that it is wrong to apply moral parameters to situations in which such considerations were simply not contemplated. In his famous essay on Shakespeare’s tragedies, he claims that these plays are better read than performed, because on stage they are either cheapened, or, worse, misconstrued. The essay correctly indicates the difference between spectator and reader, and the different criteria of reception, but is unconvincing when it states that the spectator may be affected by the actions of the character on the stage but not by his inner struggles, though it is true that the actor may at times upstage the character (Brecht had not yet delved into estrangement!) and that certain ideological prejudices (like the ‘impropriety’ of a white Venetian woman marrying a Moor) lose their bite when the play is read, not seen. In Specimens of English Dramatic Poets it is significant that Lamb should single out for praise stoic heroines like Ford’s Calantha or Fletcher’s Ordella. All this is dealt with at greater length in the second volume of Wellek’s History of Modern Criticism (cf. WHM, vol. II, 191–95). Like his famous statement that blacks are by now integrated in society but Elia prefers to have nothing to do with them.

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verb endings for both serious and comic effect.9 Lamb’s essays pave the way for Dickens’s sketches and Thackeray’s Roundabout Papers; their influence extends as far as Alexander Smith, the author of Dreamthorp, the second or third greatest book of personal essays of the nineteenth century (never fully acknowledged by the critical establishment).10 The Victorians held him in great esteem, and numerous ‘Charles Lamb clubs’ kept his memory alive especially during the Christmas festivities with the typically English mistletoe, punch and Christmas pudding. By the middle of the twentieth century, Lamb was viewed with a more critical eye,11 and in the 1970s many literary pundits pronounced his reputation to be clinically dead,12 a diagnosis largely determined by the climate of political protest and the aesthetic theory according to which all art must be engagé; in the following years, the situation was reversed, and artists were almost expected to distance themselves from the macrocosm of public affairs, and concentrate on the microcosm of individual phenomena. 2. Lamb’s life and works were dedicated to the pursuit of a balance between extremes and extremisms with which he was all too familiar.13 His literary output is piecemeal, fragmentary, dispersive, and disorganized; he wrote no great single work, and never even attempted one. He was incapable of creating his own subjects and contents, and was forced to lean on others; he was a slave who longed for freedom, a parasite with ambitions of an independent existence. He experimented with a host of literary genres, and his career can be seen as the gradual discovery – via a variety of errors, wrong turnings, failures and fiascos – of a form of writing he could call his own, and which, indeed could be his by definition: he himself called this form the ‘Eliac’, after his Essays of Elia. Before emerging into the sunlight of 9

10 11 12 13

Carlyle was influenced by Lamb (though he disapproved of him). In his sketch ‘A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis’ Lamb says that ‘to be naked is to be so much nearer to the being of man, than to go in livery’, so suggestive of one of Carlyle’s principal lines of thought. Volume 4, § 228. Barnett 1976, 92, lists, among the celebrities hostile to him – after Carlyle – Paul Elmer Moore, Graham Greene and Conan Doyle. SSI, vol. II, 213. ‘The greatness of wit […] manifests itself in the admirable balance of all the faculties’.

§ 224. Lamb

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this discovery, Lamb was a wanderer in the woods of anonymity, dependent on the generous help of more celebrated colleagues. Like Joyce, he was a social animal who needed friends as the very air he breathed, and, perhaps as a consequence, his many friendships were placed on hold by instances of disagreement, quarrelling and suspicions, sometimes as brief as the day is long.14 His sonnets, hidden away in Coleridge’s first collection of poems in 1796 (with no indication of the author’s identity) are a disquieting phenomenon: either Lamb had no sense of literary ‘ownership’, or he declined to acknowledge them because he was secretly dissatisfied with them. In 1819 (but dated 1796), he published a series of fake ‘original letters’ written by Falstaff, belonging to a ‘descendant of Mistress Quickly’. Rosamund Gray (1798) is a pastiche of plain, simple prose (quite unusual in Lamb) with occasional unacknowledged poetic quotations and parodies of scraps of epistolary novels; the finale sees an abrupt change from a third- to a firstperson narration.15 Far from original is his attempt at tragedy, John Woodvil (1802), with its chaotic plot of betrayal, dissipation and punishment at the time of the Restoration. In 1800, Lamb the ‘chameleon’ (the meaning of the epithet will be explained later), published some imitations of Burton, encouraged by Coleridge, who saw clearly which way his friend’s talents lay. It is particularly significant of his constant but fruitless search for the right genre that he himself should have booed, along with the rest of the audience, a farce he had written, entitled Mr H (1806): in it, a woman rejects the advances of the autobiographical protagonist, Hogsflesh; the fact that author and protagonist have surnames with ‘animal connections’ would seem to suggest some deep, secret conflict in the writer. Much the same could be said of Tales from Shakespear, too, which reads like the sources Shakespeare based his plays on, or at least a reworking, adaptation, imitation, rifacimento or what you will. What is certain is that the Tales are a

14 15

Among his friends were people of widely different backgrounds and temperaments, like a Quaker, a mathematician and the old classical scholar, Dyer. The biographical data are jumbled: on one side, an ingenuous thirteen-year-old girl with a devout grandmother, on the other, an older brother and sister; in both cases the parents are absent. In the forest, Rosamund is raped by the villain, Matravis (the Gothic or Jacobean element).

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completely new phenomenon, written, moreover, with a collaborator, and aimed at younger readers (it is as though the author(s) no longer had much confidence in adult readers). It is a mystery why the above-mentioned works, which he deplored and disowned in 1818, should have been included in his collected works while he was still alive. In 1820, he created ‘Elia’; the search was over; he had found his way, and, with it, his voice. 3. The expression ‘gentle-hearted’ was coined for him by Coleridge, who used it in a letter; it reflected his friend’s reputation for kindness, generosity and good-heartedness, but Lamb, strangely enough, took umbrage at it despite the fact that he was, without doubt, ‘unquarrelsome’, mild, and absolutely harmless. He was untouched by diversities of political opinions in his friends, also because he himself had no well-defined political convictions. Though, if anything, a Tory, he wrote for Whig papers, like Hunt’s. He was ecumenical: ‘What any man can write I may read’. Mental instability was in his DNA; he realized this and took preventive and protective measures. His stutter and his straitened circumstances16 prevented him from going to university and, possibly, from becoming an Anglican minister, a position that would have guaranteed a comfortable standard of living. Through his mouthpiece, Elia, Lamb affirmed that he had resigned himself to his thirtyfive years of office work because ‘time partially reconciles us to anything’ (my italics), and added: ‘I gradually become content – doggedly content, as wild animals in cages’. Unrequited love when young (for a certain Ann Simmons, who appears under a different name in the essays), frustration in his literary ambitions, and his soul-destroying pen-pushing office job 16

His father, who went into a precocious psycho-physical decline, had been a scrivener and assistant to the lawyer, Sir Samuel Salt, described, along with other members of the London judicial college, in ‘The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple’, an essay which is also a lament for a lost paradise, remembered by Lamb as an age of fountains and sundials (so different from cold, mechanical clocks) and the Thames personified as ‘king of rivers’, ‘but just weaned from her Twickenham Naiades’. Lamb was born in Salt’s house, where his family were guests; besides his sister, Mary, there was a brother, a year older, who later lived separately from the rest of the family. Before the tragedy (of which, more later), Mary took in work as a seamstress to help towards the upkeep of the household.

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all joined forces to bring on a bout of insanity, which led to six months in a mental asylum, on a voluntary basis, in 1795. He recovered, and suffered no relapse. In the essay entitled ‘The Wedding’ Lamb openly declares his regret at not having had a wife and children: Elia is always happy when he goes to a wedding, and in the following days enjoys what might be called a ‘vicarious honeymoon’.17 The great tragedy of his life, which could easily have scarred him indelibly and hurled him back into insanity, was eventually weathered thanks to the mechanisms of displacement and the understatement: in December, 1796, his sister, Mary, over-burdened with domestic duties, stabbed her mother to death with a bread-knife and wounded her father. From that moment on, Lamb became, literally, the ‘Lamb of God’, a Christ-like self-immolator (he went, when young, to school at Christ’s Hospital), and dedicated his life to taking care of her, thus sparing her the further distress of a prison for the insane.18 4. Essays of Elia (1823) and Last Essays of Elia (1833), the former published from 1820 in the London Magazine and the latter – fifty-two in all – in various other periodicals, were attributed to ‘Elia’ – the surname, not first name, of an Italian friend of Lamb’s, like him employed as a clerk in the East India Company. The ‘death’ of this convenient, see-through mask was commemorated in the preface to the second collection of essays in one of the many epitaphs. The freedom of movement and ironic detachment inherent in the use of a persona can be conveniently tied to the imperfect anagram, ‘a liar’ (actually a kind of assonance). But the ‘teller of untruths’ is not the only meaning suggested by the name of ‘Elia’ which, judging from the great number of references to the Bible – and bearing in mind that Lamb was destined at first to the Anglican ministry – probably alludes to the prophet Elias (or Elijah). Lamb’s essays are also a self-portrait of a

17

18

Pater saw in Lamb traces of the religious feeling of Greek tragedy, and Thackeray referred to him as St Charles (Tillotson, Essays of Elia, London 1968, xiv). Lamb compensated for not having had children of his own by adopting Emma Isola, the orphan of an Italian father, in 1823. In 1819, he proposed to an actress by the name of Frances Kelly. He was turned down, and once again set his ‘good heart’ at rest.

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writer who has nothing to do with Romanticism, and is, on the contrary, solidly lower-middle class, with more than a touch of the philistine. Only half-jokingly, Lamb confesses he is prejudiced against the Scots, the Jews and blacks; he candidly admits he is tone-deaf, hates going to concerts and operas, and indeed, has been known to flee whatever temple of music he may have been constrained to attend and immerse himself in the familiar din and bustle of his beloved London streets. But the question arises: was Lamb really this low-brow enemy of the Romantic paraphernalia of the sublime and the intangible, or was he playing a game from behind his mask? At times he is seized by nostalgia, and finds himself giving voice to sentiments like ‘things were better in the good old days’, and ‘things were better then’. Yet Elia is also capable of surprising the reader with occasional bursts of public conscience, and calls for social reform and political intervention, or just plain Christian charity. For example, he is against the ‘rationalistic’ solution to the problem of poverty which entails running beggars out of town; or he criticizes what he sees as the hypocrisy of primly saying grace before meals, and then laying into the first of many courses with unbridled voracity. Often, the subject or starting point of an essay is deliberately ‘uninteresting’, or humdrum, or paradoxical – it is better to remain single than to be saddled with a nagging wife; poor relations are an embarrassment; people are either lenders or borrowers (in one of his most engaging essays, he proves that Coleridge, as a borrower, is unbeatable). At New Year, the dying year is ushered out and the continuation of life celebrated; a few years later, Leopardi was to give expression to similar sentiments in his Operette Morali (which somewhat resemble Lamb’s essays in subjects and contents, though not in style). In one of the many essays dedicated to theatre going, Lamb – unwisely, one might think – defends the figure of Malvolio, which he saw as having a dignity that Shakespeare intended the audience should recognize and appreciate. The style of the essays is overburdened by rhetorical figures: long, drawn-out sentences are vehicles for woolly disquisitions on nothing at all, which sometimes, however, are brought to an abrupt stop by an aphorism in the manner of Johnson, or a neoclassical antithesis Pope would not have been ashamed of. Such a dense style, further aggravated by the use of strange, archaic words, or by neologisms, as well as barrow-loads of quotations, especially in

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Latin, does not make for easy reading, and necessitates a sturdy apparatus of notes (often provided in modern editions). Very often, a sentence will consist almost entirely of a series of colourful synonyms, both literal and figurative, or various extravagant definitions; a bizarre, whimsical subject may be handled with tragic seriousness or, quite the opposite, with facetiousness. The titles themselves of the essays are frequently misleading. Just as often, however, Lamb’s tendency to exceed in rhetorical decorativeness gives way to a more disciplined vein of writing, and the results are outstanding. The key to Lamb’s long-sought literary ‘method’ is found in ‘Mackery End, in Hertfordshire’: ‘Narrative teazes me. I have little concern in the progress of events’. On the contrary, his sister, Mary (‘cousin Bridget’ in the essays) demanded the concatenation of plot. Lamb-Elia often forces himself to recount an anecdote, but is clearly uncomfortable in doing so: such pieces lack life; they begin and end as sculptures or still photographs of people or places where all is static, and nothing moves. ‘A Dissertation upon Roast Pig’ is a rare exception, in that it does involve an anecdote, told straightforwardly, with an absolute minimum of ornament, Latin quotations or erudite allusions. At the end of the anecdote, however, Lamb inserts one of his usual variations – in this case, his aunt’s plum cake, which he gives to a beggar in a fit of generosity, only to regret this charitable impulse almost immediately. ‘I could never listen to even the better kind of modern novel without extreme irksomeness’, he states in another essay significantly entitled ‘Detached Thoughts on Books’. Lamb’s purple passages make up a series of cameos resembling one of Proust’s endless sentences – with its memory of time gone by conveyed by a series of anaphora and asyndeta – or something from the pages of Virginia Woolf. The Last Essays are usually considered – wrongly – inferior and marked by tiredness. In ‘Sanity of True Genius’ Lamb affirms the poet’s mastery over the material world and reiterates his condemnation of exalted Romanticism. It is, in short, a miniature anti-Romantic manifesto. The generous, old retired captain, Jackson, embodies the type of ‘sentimental’ gentleman made famous by Sterne. ‘Old China’ – which, it has often been said, is a less metaphysical, less intriguing version of Keats’s ode on a Grecian urn – modulates into yet another emotional reminiscence of times gone by.

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§ 225. De Quincey* The very mention of Charles Lamb conjures up, in most people’s minds, the name of Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859). Though there are similarities between the two, they are fundamentally very different from one another, so that to speak of them in one breath, as though they were somehow identical, is a historical error that calls out to be corrected. It is true that both published their main works in the London Magazine, and almost at the same time. Furthermore, both were part of the group of friends that orbited round Wordsworth and Coleridge; they both reminisced on childhood. Both – but principally De Quincey – mainly wrote prose to 1

*

Collected Writings, ed. D. Masson, 14 vols, Edinburgh 1889–1890, 1895–1896, now superseded by The Works of Thomas De Quincey, ed. G. Lindop et al., 21 vols, London 2000–2003. Selections: Selected Writings, ed. P. Van Doren Stern, London 1939, De Quincey as Critic, ed. J. E. Jordan, London 1973, and The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, ed. G. Lindop, Oxford 1985. V. Woolf, ‘De Quincey’s Autobiography’, TCR, Second Series, 132–9; E. Ainsworth, Thomas De Quincey: A Biography, New York 1936, 1972; H. A. Eaton, Thomas de Quincey, London 1936; E. Sackville-West, A Flame in Sunlight: The Life and Work of Thomas De Quincey, London 1936; J. C. Metcalf, De Quincey: A Portrait, Cambridge, MA 1940; S. Proctor, Thomas De Quincey’s Theory of Literature, Ann Arbor, MI 1943; J. E. Jordan, Thomas De Quincey, Literary Critic: His Method and Achievement, Berkeley, CA 1952; J. Hillis Miller, ‘Thomas De Quincey’, in The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers, Cambridge, MA and London 1963, 1975, 1979, 17–80; F. Moreux, Thomas de Quincey: La vie, l’homme, l’œuvre, Paris 1964; A. H. Goldman, The Mind and the Mint: Sources for the Writings of Thomas De Quincey, Carbondale, IL 1965; J. S. Lyon, Thomas De Quincey, Boston, MA 1969; V. A. De Luca, Thomas de Quincey: The Prose of Vision, Toronto 1980; G. Lindop, The Opium-Eater: A Life of Thomas De Quincey, London 1981; J. C. Whale, Thomas De Quincey’s Reluctant Autobiography, London 1984; Thomas De Quincey: Bicentenary Studies, ed. R. L. Snyder, Norman 1985; E. Baxter, De Quincey’s Art of Autobiography, Edinburgh 1990; J. Barrell, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism, New Haven, CT 1991; J. McDonagh, De Quincey’s Disciplines, New York 1994; A. Clej, A Genealogy of the Modern Self: Thomas De Quincey and the Intoxication of Writing, Stanford, CA 1995; C. Rzepka, Sacramental Commodities: Gift, Text, and the Sublime in De Quincey, Amherst, MA 1995; M. Russet, De Quincey’s Romanticism: Canonical Minority and the Forms of Transmission, Cambridge 1997; P. Bridgwater, De Quincey’s Gothic Masquerade, Amsterdam 2004.

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the exclusion of poetry, and specialized in the essay form, although Lamb was constrained by contract to publish regularly in the same periodical (so that he practically owned the copyright to this particular from of the essay) while De Quincey enjoyed more freedom. Both paid great attention to style, but Lamb’s eccentricity, with his fake archaisms and convoluted phrasing, makes De Quincey appear flat and featureless.1 De Quincey was certainly more of a potential Romantic than Lamb: overwhelmed and metaphorically paralyzed by the two great ‘Lake Poets’, De Quincey immediately occupied the cottage in Grasmere left vacant when Wordsworth moved out; it was as though he wished to be as close as possible to the lingering spirit of the ‘Lyrical Balladeer’. Reminiscences of the Lakes and the Lake Poets2 is essential reading, even though it seems to suggest a late awakening to the need to shake off the chains forged by his two great mentors, and find his own independence (Wordsworth was put out by such a thought). De Quincey is often considered to resemble Coleridge in a number of traits: he was inconclusive, dispersive, always late in handing in his articles to the printer, obsessed by a compulsion to probe the hidden workings of the psyche, especially as expressed in dreams. He was deeply read in German philosophic idealism, and, like Coleridge, an opium addict. Before the age of twenty, he was also, like Shelley, a restless rebel. Born in Manchester, the son of a wealthy cotton merchant and a well-read, Dissenting mother, he ran away from school at seventeen and went to London, intent on eking out a living by begging in the streets. His parents found him and brought him back home. He matriculated at Oxford but left without graduating in 1808. He did, however, succeed in making a name for himself as a scholar in classical and modern literature and a man of encyclopaedic erudition. In the last thirty years of his long life – he died halfway through the reign of Victoria – he lived mainly in Scotland, and only went to London to see his publisher. He was always in debt, having to provide for the many children he fathered on the uneducated Margaret Simpson. Immediately after the 1 2

In a passage quoted by Miller 1979, 48–9, De Quincey symptomatically noted a ‘polar opposition’ between his own style and that of Lamb, totally devoid of all ‘sense of the rhythmical’. A series of essays published between 1834 and 1840.

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birth of his first child, De Quincey officialized his union by marrying her in 1817. She died in 1837, twenty-two years before him. These bare facts may give some idea of a Romantic spirit encaged by the dictates of conscience or convention. De Quincey was a wanderer, but a domestic one; like Lamb he left England only once, when he went to France. To round off the parallel with Lamb: De Quincey’s mental range is vaster and more complex than Lamb’s, leading some critics to credit him with some kind of philosophy. Lamb is Biedermeier, De Quincey is not, or is so only microscopically. 2. Such is the outcome of a lively critical debate, lasting more than fifty years of the twentieth century, aimed at describing and defining this many-faceted writer, who lived, and changed through three distinct literary periods: the late eighteenth century, the Romantic age, and the postRomantic Victorian period. He has been given three or four different labels: Biedermeier, or watered down Romantic; ‘algolagnic’, or pre-Decadent; existentialist or ante litteram modernist. A fourth one, that of neo-Gothic, has been suggested by Patrick Bridgwater who, after demonstrating De Quincey’s great familiarity with German Gothic texts, analyses Klosterheim (1832) – his only, largely ignored, novel – and finds that Kafka is a direct descendant of the ‘Opium-Eater’. De Quincey, moreover, leads us quite naturally to the topical subject of discussion, ‘art and drugs’. Praz inevitably numbered him as one of his special authors, and in The Hero in Eclipse3 presents his diagnosis of algolagnia, claiming that De Quincey found pleasure in persecution and fulfilment in being humiliated. However, it seems too easy to associate this pre-Decadentism with his being in tune with the bourgeois atmosphere of Biedermeier. Praz argues the following: De Quincey is a Janus-like writer, who, although an ‘algolagnic’, was a faithful observer of the Victorian cult of the family and of the work ethic. Proof of this lies in his dislike of Goethe’s Meister and his fondness for Jean Paul Richter and his mix of humour and sentimentality. Others before Praz had pointed out further paradoxes: he was for instance a Tory as well as a devout Anglican.4 In other words, Praz appears to be uncertain of where 3 4

PHE, 76–86. Ian Jack, without referring to Praz, reminds us ( JEL, 296) that certain taboo subjects, which could be dealt with openly in 1822, were best avoided in 1850.

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to place De Quincey respecting the antithetical parameters of his own personal vision of the nineteenth century – the parameters being sexual perversion or Biedermeier – and plumps for the latter. Even Gothic terror, says Praz, is diluted in De Quincey so as to become anything but frightening manifestations of the supernatural. Praz bases his argument on De Quincey’s opinion of Goethe’s Meister, and his criticism of the corrupt, depraved female figures. De Quincey was, he adds, a prude. However, in the end, Praz is forced to admit that at certain points in the text the two levels of De Quincey’s sensibility coincide.5 In turn, the relevant chapter in J. Hillis Miller’s The Disappearance of God ignores all earlier criticism, including the above-mentioned work by Praz, with the exception of an essay by Virginia Woolf dating from the early 1930s, in which she has words of praise for De Quincey’s autobiographical writings (in them, he transmits to the reader sensations rather than facts, and is a forerunner of the modern investigators of interior time and ‘that one moment [that] may transcend in value fifty years’,6 a cornerstone of Woolf ’s own narrative method). As is his wont, Miller surveys De Quincey’s entire output paying no attention to internal divisions, and seeing it as one vast network of intercommunicating parts. This is risky, as he builds his argument on selections of text taken from widely differing contexts and from different books; it also suggests that the critic is ‘bending’ evidence to fit in with his neat geometric model. Miller is so apodictic as to convince the reader that Praz got it all wrong and must have been reading some other author, not De Quincey, who, in Miller’s eyes, is an existentialist. De Quincey considers life to be a vacuum, and his works are to be read as a spiritual adventure and a transcendental journey beginning with his sister’s death – a crucial event that made the adolescent author exclaim that ‘all was lost’. Miller applies to him a paraphrase of Eliot’s ‘I can connect nothing / With nothing’, and demonstrates that, fundamentally, De Quincey’s recurrent theme is the 5 6

However, in his note on De Quincey in 1978 (cf. SSI, vol. II, 216) Praz seems to say that algolagnia is uppermost. TCR, Second Series, 138. De Quincey’s poetics is synthesized in a short critical essay in which informative literature is distinguished from literature whose aim is to move the reader.

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tantalising elusiveness of God, as expressed in the famous dream of the staircase in Piranesi’s etching (with its reiterated motif ) and in Achilles pursuing the tortoise. Just as significant is the fact that Miller connects the end of this quest with Conrad’s ‘horror’. The last page of Miller’s essay is the most surprising: he argues that De Quincey, like Eliot, ‘recaptures’ God at the very last moment, for God abides with pain and solitude. In reality, De Quincey’s essays are ever changing, always open and ready to be modified by new readers. He attributed his re-awakening to the meaning of the cosmos and rediscovery of the hidden godhead to his use of opium.7 This erroneous equation speaks volumes of the fragility of De Quincey’s literary castle, and of Miller’s critical reconstruction, too. Opium brought terrifying nightmares, but also dispensed illusions of bliss and led the dreamer back to the happier days of childhood. So De Quincey was always ‘in two minds’ about the drug: he warned his readers against excessive indulgence in it, but at the same time, magnified its therapeutic properties. 3. In short, De Quincey has had, and still has his admirers, but the recent republication of his immense opera omnia is, rather than a sign of revival of interest, a question of normal editorial administration. The ‘essential De Quincey’ – four or five works in all – is contained in a slim volume, just over 200 pages, as against the fourteen or twenty-one volumes of thousands of pages each, that make up his complete works. De Quincey was not only a rambling, heterogeneous polymath who published the fruits of his work in various periodicals; he was also a tireless reviser: when he was invited by Hogg, the publisher, to prepare a collected edition of his works, he produced a second version of the Confessions of an Opium-Eater that was four times the length of the first (1822), thanks to the addition of various decorative sections and non-essential digressions. Experts in textual variants judge the two texts to be quite different, and prefer the earlier version. I shall do the same. De Quincey’s worst stylistic trait has often been identified in a weakness for ‘rigmarole’ (a mirror image of his philosophical meanderings). Like Sterne, he loves to quote; he particularly likes inventing quotations, and will often refer to anecdotes and

7

It could be bought without a doctor’s prescription, was relatively inexpensive, and, therefore, not limited to the moneyed class.

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scenes from sources that the reader would look for in vain, since they are the product of De Quincey’s invention. Like Sterne, he teases the reader, leading him astray, then making fun of him even more by promising final, clarifying notes that simply do not exist. Again like Sterne, he dwells on insignificant details, on trivial, absurd minutiae, or on an exemplum that exemplifies nothing and is an end in itself – a technique that he himself likens to Mercury’s wand (basically representing medicine) wrapped up in all sorts of decorations. The real point is the meandering variations, not ‘the naked physiological theme’. This apart, De Quincey often makes heavy reading; but now and again he is truly inspired, and launches into accounts of strange happenings and even stranger dreams. The Confessions are a typical mix – down-to-earth narrative and, for example, poetic effusion in praise of solitude, beginning with a preface and turning into an autobiographical essay which digresses into a clinical or pseudo-clinical disquisition in the manner of Thomas Browne, then turns into a pre-Freudian chart of opium-induced dreams. De Quincey is always ambiguous: he says he has beaten his addiction, and no longer exceeds in his use of the substance, but then admits its ‘fascinating enthralment’. A few pages from the end, this same sibylline, ‘algolagnic’ concept is repeated: ‘it was solely by the tortures connected with the attempt to abjure it, that it kept its hold’. The title refers, quite clearly, to the Roman Catholic sacrament of confession, with the same reservations used by Browning a few years later in his farewell to Shelley in Pauline (whose sub-heading is A Fragment of a Confession). In the first of the four parts, the atmosphere is that of Dickensian picaresque in a London quite different to Lamb’s – labyrinthine, sinister, full of dark corners round which jump out various unsavoury figures, a world of squalor and crime, of prostitutes and pimps. De Quincey proposes his version of the female in a fifteen-year-old prostitute, Ann, who, in a deeply moving scene, refreshes the fugitive with a glass of wine before disappearing. Opium raises its head as a stimulator and enhancer of an imagination that is already congenitally hyperexcited. Used first as a medicine, it gradually becomes a talisman. As he goes on, De Quincey redefines the objective of his work as ‘to reveal something of the grandeur which belongs potentially to human dreams’, like cables that connect the dreamer with the realm of shadows, and that ‘force[s] the infinite into the chambers of the human brain’. In dreams there is always a power ‘not contented with reproduction, but which

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absolutely creates or transforms’ (Freud’s Traumwerk?); at the same time, dreams deform, dilate and compress space and time, resulting in visions of fantastical buildings, of lakes, seas and oceans, faces, animals (which are almost always repulsive, like the crocodile). ‘Suspiria de Profundis’ (1845), in heterogeneous unnumbered chapters, might at first sight appear to be a clumsy attempt to fill in the holes left by the Confessions, but it turns out to be rhapsodic, meditative and nostalgic, with digressions on the psychology of the child and the religious feeling that usually pervades it. Walter Pater was probably moved when he read of ‘the child in the house’ surrounded by the shades of death; and Pater cannot but bring to mind Proust, the searcher par excellence of lost time. ‘Suspiria’ celebrates the oneiric faculty in an age that is hostile to dreaming and does everything it can to suffocate it, so that one wishes ‘this colossal pace of advance’ could be held back a while. The remedy invoked by De Quincey is Augustinian retreat into the solitude of contemplative life. In the impressive digression on the ‘palimpsest’, De Quincey seems to stray from his subject when he speaks of the various difficulties that hindered the invention of printing; in reality, the palimpsest gradually becomes a metaphor of the mind, seen as a series of levels of awareness – geological strata which go deeper and deeper into the earth, but can be unburied and examined by experts. Opium is the tool for releasing distant memories from the grip of time, and in this has much the same function as the modern psychoanalyst. ‘Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrows’, the third and last part of ‘Suspiria’, is extraordinarily similar to the mythological rhapsodies of the later Ruskin, with its reconstruction of the mysterious workings and identification of each of the three hypostases, and the memory of the sorrow felt when young. The account of the ascent of the legendary peak of Brocken leads to the formulation of an obscure interpreter who enters dreams, sometimes leaving the dreamer and mixing with other natures. De Quincey alludes to the gap between waking and dream life. Uncertain though De Quincey’s steps may be in his progress through this labyrinthine digression, it is nonetheless of fundamental importance for any serious discussion of De Quincey’s dissociation, and his ability to be inside a dream one minute and outside the next. 4. In ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’, De Quincey foreshadows Browning when he says that the poet ‘must throw the interest [not on the murdered] but on the murderer. Our sympathy must be with him […] a

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sympathy by which we enter into his feelings, and are made to understand them’. In other words, De Quincey has understood and formulated one of the structural laws of the dramatic monologue, identified in ‘sympathy’ (in the original, Greek, sense of the word, which is not ‘pity’, or ‘compassion’, but ‘feeling with’). ‘The English Mail Coach’, the most acrobatic, daring, and humorous of all of De Quincey’s essays, keeps putting off the main subject by means of the wildest and most far-fetched analogies. He brings in Plato when he affirms that the mail coach symbolizes the working of the mind itself: by delivering the mail, it spreads word of the great victories of the British army and navy abroad; it makes the passenger long to become a coach driver (this is miniature Romanticism, since the French Revolution is reduced to the revolving wheels of the stage coach). For once, De Quincey’s method resembles that of Lamb, who, in ‘Old Benchers’, contrasted sundials with mechanical clocks. De Quincey, too, prefers the more old-fashioned of the two: the coach unites people (while that modern monstrosity, the train, scatters them) and provides time for courting while the horses are changed. When De Quincey finally gets to the point, we are regaled with an account of a journey out of London just after the victory of Talavera; in the coach De Quincey makes the acquaintance of a woman who exults at the victory, though she knows – or feels in her heart – that she has lost a son in the battle. The series of associations includes a night-time crash between two coaches, distanced and transfigured by being couched in mythological terms. The last scene is an oneiric phantasmagoria of all these motifs, with flashes of a sinking war-ship, a coach bursting into a cathedral, a little girl weeping over the price of victory; the mail coach bears the news of ‘Waterloo and Recovered Christendom’, and the weak are strengthened. § 226. Hazlitt* English liberal and radical culture has always been generous in its praise for William Hazlitt (1778–1830), as both a critic and an essayist, 1

*

Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols, London 1930–1934; Selected Writings, ed. D. Wu, 9 vols, Oxford 1998. The Letters of William Hazlitt, ed. H. M. Sikes et al., New York 1978. Life. P. P. Howe, The Life of William Hazlitt, London 1922, 1947, Harmondsworth 1949; C. M. Maclean, Born Under Saturn: A Biography of William Hazlitt, New York

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while not sparing some, quite firm strictures. The enduring nature of his fame is proved by the number of biographies and critical studies dedicated to him – more than to Lamb or De Quincey. It might be said that while many criticize and minimize his work, most admire and appreciate him. Of course, it must be admitted that Hazlitt is much less popular outside the English-speaking world, and was, until recently, ignored by most textbooks of literary history. Taine has nothing to say on him; Legouis and Cazamian are laudable exceptions to this rule of silence, but even Saintsbury limits himself to a grudging nod in his direction. Praz, unforgivably, omits him completely from his History, and in The Hero in Eclipse, where essayists and oddballs are at home, not only does not give him a chapter but states, condescendingly, that a few words are sufficient in his regard, and, in the closing lines of his chapter on Peacock, that Hazlitt writes with ‘unadorned purism’ and ‘grows rigid in its fixedness of design’.1 Today, Praz would be crucified for such a comment, but perhaps he is right. Hazlitt may well be just an exceptional critic – still read today for his milestone studies on Shakespeare, English comedy and the Romantic poets – but one who has 1944; H. Baker, William Hazlitt, Cambridge, MA 1962; S. Jones, Hazlitt: A Life from Winterslow to Frith Street, Oxford and New York 1989. Criticism. V. Woolf, ‘William Hazlitt’, TCR, Second Series, 173–85; E. Schneider, The Aesthetics of William Hazlitt, Philadelphia, PA 1933, and ‘William Hazlitt’, in The English Romantic Poets and Essayists: A Review of Research and Criticism, ed. C. W. Houtchens and L. H. Houtchens, New York and London, 1957, 1966, 75–113; M. H. Law, The English Familiar Essay in the Early Nineteenth Century: The Elements Old and New Which Went into Its Making as Exemplified in the Writings of Hunt, Hazlitt and Lamb, New York 1934, 1965; W. P. Albrecht, Hazlitt and the Creative Imagination, Lawrence, KS 1965; R. Park, Hazlitt and the Spirit of the Age: Abstraction and Critical Theory, Oxford 1971; R. M. Wardle, Hazlitt, Lincoln, NE 1971; J. Kinnaird, William Hazlitt: Critic of Power, New York 1978; D. Bromwich, Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic, New Haven, CT and London 1983, 1999; J. Bate, The Cure for Love, New York 1998; U. Natarajan, Hazlitt and the Reach of Sense, Oxford 1998, also editor, with T. Paulin, of Metaphysical Hazlitt, London 2005; T. Paulin, The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt’s Radical Style, London 1998; A. C. Grayling, The Quarrel of the Age: The Life and Times of William Hazlitt, London 2000; D. Wu, William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man, Oxford and New York 2008. 1

PHE, 101.

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left little else besides a few essays, which lack the idiosyncrasies of style that have conferred immortality upon Lamb and De Quincey. One of the reasons the English continue to like Hazlitt is precisely the absence in him of the artificiality that distinguishes his fellow-essayists mentioned above. In his lifetime, he was defamed and damned by Tories like Lockhart and Gifford, and the English, after all, love an underdog. He was a fighter: quarrelsome, quick to react, but he probably fitted the category of those ‘more sinned against than sinning’. His ‘love life’ – excellent material for a novel – showed all the signs of naïvety and weakness rather than any kind of blackguardly selfishness. At heart, he was a Romantic: ever nostalgic for his Shropshire childhood, he hoped and believed in a bright tomorrow before his dream had time to fade. He soon became an icon of the stalwart Englishman – honest and trustworthy, ready to do what has to be done without demur. In part, he was a self-made man, with no regular schooling and no university training. As a critic, he was sincere, objective, politically impartial, and driven by what he really felt rather than by any fixed rules. Most importantly, he was not fanatical about ‘foreign’ writers. Anyone who had tired of Lamb’s honeyed mawkishness, or De Quincey’s tangled lucubrations, could turn to Hazlitt to find an essayist who spoke in his own voice, with no need for a mask or filter. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Stephen dynasty joined the ranks of his admirers: Virginia Woolf, writing for the centenary of his death, praised him as a fearless champion of freedom. Maybe the creator of Lily Briscoe had a particular liking for Hazlitt because he was, among other things, a painter who – a kind of Van Gogh, in reality – once, in a fit of rage, had ripped up one of his canvases because it was so far from the work of his hero, Rembrandt. After a brief mention of Hazlitt’s unhappy marriage to his first wife, Woolf provides her own literary verdict: his personal essays, she says, are the best things he wrote, but she finds they lack the stylishness and wit of those by Lamb. They are a hotchpotch, in which the voice of the lucid, earnest, objective thinker jars with that of the sensitive artist who starts and raises his hackles as soon as he believes he is threatened. His essays are feeble and limited in range, she continues, but so would those by any writer seem when compared with the founding Essais by Montaigne. Woolf concludes by saying that Hazlitt rarely finds the inner peace that smoothes out all differences.

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2. Hazlitt’s father, a Unitarian minister, was a firm supporter of American independence, and took his family to Massachusetts when William was a child. They returned to England and settled near Shrewsbury, and it was here that fourteen-year-old Hazlitt wrote a letter to a local newspaper dictated by the consolidated connection between Unitarianism and Radicalism: the letter was a protest against the attacks on the theologian, Priestley, himself a radical.2 At first Hazlitt was educated at home on an unusually wide range of subjects; he was then sent to Hackney College, a theological institute, where he was meant to prepare for the ministry and thus follow in his father’s footsteps. After two years at Hackney, he found he had lost his faith and, therefore, his vocation; he turned to painting, like his elder brother. In France he saw at first hand his dream of revolution attempting to be born.3 In Paris, he visited the art galleries and copied the works of all the great painters. Though moderately talented, he had to recognize, in the end, that painting was not, after all, his calling. It was Coleridge – he had met him when he returned from America – who urged him to become a writer and who penned his famous identikit: ‘brow-hanging, shoe-contemplative, strange’. All things considered, Hazlitt might well fit into the category of ‘watered-down Romantics’. He was a left-wing intellectual, and spent his life campaigning against turncoats – those fanatical believers in the French Revolution who changed their minds, like Southey and Wordsworth (De Quincey, too, came in for criticism). But creative writing was not for him either. So he turned to surrogate forms. The confession of his ‘second-hand’ Romanticism is to be found in one of his finest essays, ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’.4 He married a friend of the Lambs, Sarah Stoddart, but mutual incompatibility led to divorce. He then 2 3 4

§ 112.2. His biography of Napoleon (1828–1830), predictably divided between praise for proclaiming freedom and blame for having betrayed it, is considered a failure by the majority of critics. The poets in question are Coleridge and Wordsworth. This glorification of the first generation of Romantic poets, written in 1823, actually reduces them, at the same time, to more homely dimensions: see, for example the flash that lights up the figure of Coleridge, the morning after his arrival at Wem, as – torn between poetry and preaching – he ties the laces on one of his shoes; or Wordsworth’s ravenous hunger,

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courted, and nearly married, the flirtatious daughter of his landlord, and wrote about the painful experience in Liber Amoris (1823), a book that is disliked by those who insist on seeing Hazlitt only as a virile writer with an aversion for sentimentality. He did eventually get married again, this time to a widow, but separated three years later. Hazlitt’s first publication, in 1805, was an anti-Hobbesian treatise on the ‘Principles of Human Action’. The following years saw other works on philosophy and ethics, none of which met with any commercial success or critical acclaim. He tried writing about the theatre, and achieved a certain degree of fame with Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (1817), the first part of a series consisting of Lectures on the English Poets and Lectures on the English Comic Writers (both published in 1819), and completed by Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth (1820), The Spirit of the Age (1825, twenty-five portraits of contemporary writers), and Table Talk (1821–1822). Even an admirer like Woolf found that Hazlitt is a ‘summarizer’ rather than a true analyst of literary texts. Instead of examining, he used intuition, and, revealing a basic lack of knowledge, found himself often in untenable situations. But is she right? If she is, then Hazlitt must be considered rather obtuse, superficial and sketchy, and a sophisticated philistine. The most that could be said of him would be that he is a critic of taste. Twenty years after Woolf, René Wellek was much more draconian: Hazlitt is an anthologizer, a reminiscer, specializing in metaphorical characterization and the personal touch; this makes it even more surprising that a critic like Praz did not take to him, since one of these traits – analogy – is also his favourite mode. Hazlitt, like Praz, makes great use of metaphor in describing a writer or a work; sometimes the metaphors work, sometimes they fail. Wellek approves of Hazlitt’s essays on the English poets, but not of his lectures on Shakespeare. Hazlitt did not distinguish clearly between art and life, like Bradley, his pupil; he shared Lamb’s erroneous belief that Shakespeare is better read than seen in the theatre. Wellek ends his critique by claiming that Hazlitt simply did not understand several of his contemporaries. In reality, Hazlitt’s only ambition was to do, 100 years later, what Addison had done for his when, on his return to Nether Stowey from London, he devours half a whole Cheshire cheese.

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contemporary readership. Like Addison, he explains literature and art5 to the common man, with none of the fancy frills of the academic critic.6 It is no mean achievement to be, as Hazlitt was, one of the first authoritative guides to the historical reception of writers in English, the inaugurator of the language and style of the historical survey; in short, the first modern literary historian, whose comprehensive vision includes contemporary writers. 3. Hazlitt’s importance as a writer is largely based on his ‘personal’ essays rather than on his ‘lectures’ (still being published posthumously in the middle of the twentieth century). The books published during his lifetime were soon cannibalized for use in anthologies, as was, perhaps, natural and wise, for the essence of Hazlitt lies in these short, individual anecdotes and accounts of this man without a mask, his fears and fancies, his pastimes and peregrinations, his thoughts and reflections and Montaignesque ‘undulations’. These are essays that are not likely to set the world on fire: they are tame, almost lifeless, quite unlike his reputation; in their movement they belong to the eighteenth century; like Addison in particular, highly readable though, maybe, insubstantial. Generally speaking, Hazlitt – who trained himself to think philosophically – is more convincing when he has a solid starting point and something concrete to expound. So, ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’ hits the target, as does the dynamic ‘The Fight’. When he labours over some abstract point of theory – such as ‘nicknames are odious’, or ‘no young person ever thinks he can die’, which are, after all, truisms – then he tends to become repetitive and tedious. 5

6

In ‘On Gusto’ Hazlitt supports, like De Quincey, an art as ‘power’ rather than one as ‘knowledge’ (§ 225.2 n. 6), a power that he improperly calls by using this Italian word – ‘gusto’ – and which means to him a power emanating from the contemplation of the painting or the experience of reading a poem. The term, in my opinion, was perhaps suggested by the English word ‘gust’, for which see the following quotation from the chapter on Shakespeare and Milton in Lectures on the English Poets: ‘The gusts of passion come and go like sounds of music borne on the wind’. Hazlitt is a romantic in the most plenary sense as ‘gusto’ is opposed to ethereal and non-dynamic neoclassical harmony. Hopkins might have meditated and absorbed these reflections by coining his famous neologism, ‘instress’, which he applied to some of the same painters approved by Hazlitt, like Michelangelo. His essay on the educational function of the theatre, ‘On Actors and Acting’, is particularly redolent of Addison.

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§ 227. Smith Sydney Smith (1771–1845) deserves a mention. Though not himself Scottish – and an Anglican priest, to boot – he started the Edinburgh Review together with Jeffrey and Brougham, and wrote for it from 1802 to 1828. The son of a wealthy merchant, he went to Winchester and Oxford, then entered the Church (it was suggested that he was urged on in this by his father). He ended up in Edinburgh by chance, as tutor to a pupil who had been advised to leave the University of Weimar and go to Edinburgh because of the threat of war in Germany. His contemporaries admired and feared his pungent satirical wit. A collection of moralia (1804–1806) sparkles with Addison-style aphorisms, and demonstrates extraordinary powers of observation that does not baulk even at the most disgusting and repulsive sights (tropical insects in particular, and the metaphysics of the toucan). Between 1807 and 1808 he published the ten Letters of Peter Plymley in which, no doubt for political expediency, he expressed his support for Catholic emancipation (unlike Southey, for example). The letters are addressed to a fictitious brother, Abraham, a dim-witted country parson. Smith might seem, but is not, a second Swift in Whig attire, given his objective, neutral defence of Catholicism and the rights of the Irish. He championed many other different causes. He ministered to a parish in Yorkshire that had been without a vicar for 150 years, and built a vicarage along with a reputation for good works. This has led some to see an analogy with George Herbert; but Smith was anything but ‘spiritual’, and at the end of his life was a canon of St Paul’s and a preacher for the rich and noble. He became unexpectedly famous again fifty years ago, when Auden published a voluminous anthology of his writings.1 § 228. Hunt Here and there in the course of this volume I have mentioned James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784–1859) in connection with other, greater, writers and, in particular, with three milestones in English Romanticism, the first being the discovery, befriending and launching of Keats as a poet in

1

Selected Writings, London 1957.

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1816. Hunt was only thirty-two at the time, but he was already an experienced and successful journalist in the lower reaches of the literary world. His parents were American colonists – the mother a Quaker, the father a Philadelphia lawyer born in Barbados, with Creole blood in his veins, forced back to England because of his support for the monarchy. He was ordained an Anglican priest and given a living in the London suburbs. Leigh, his son, was enrolled in Christ’s Hospital School two years after Lamb and Coleridge had completed their studies there. Like Lamb, Hunt stuttered, and so was unable to attend university. A precocious talent, in 1801 he published a volume of Juvenilia, followed by theatre reviews. In 1808, he and his brother, John, started up a Sunday paper called The Examiner, the first of many other, usually short-lived, journals. I will mention another one of them below. Unsurprisingly, Hunt, like many other budding writers at the end of the eighteenth century, turned his back on the faith of his fathers and embraced the ideals of the Revolution, and, in his newspaper articles, campaigned for Catholic emancipation and the reform of Parliament and criminal law. He caught the attention of the London literary scene in 1813 not by virtue of his sonnets, but because he was fined the sum of £500 and sentenced to two years in prison for calling the Prince Regent, in one of his articles, a ‘fat fifty-year-old Adonis’. Demonstrating remarkable resilience, he obtained permission from the prison authorities to transform his cell into a kind of Popian grotto, painting the walls in a pastel shade and adding floral decorations. In those two years spent behind bars, he was visited by all sorts of fellow-writers, eager to express their solidarity with their audacious colleague. He was released in 1816; the next time we see him he is standing in front of Shelley’s funeral pyre on the beach near Viareggio. He had gone to Italy to start up, with Shelley and Byron, yet another journal, The Liberal, a quarterly aimed at the ordinary English reader desirous to keep abreast of articles, essays and translations of continental literature. Without the mediation of Shelley, Hunt and Byron could not get along together; they were too different both politically and temperamentally. The quarterly folded after four numbers, although one of them – this is the third ‘milestone’ – contained Byron’s The Vision of Judgment. Hunt wreaked a tardy revenge for the humiliation he suffered at the hands of the famous poet, and Dickens drew a rather mean portrait of him in the Skimpole of

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Bleak House. By comparison, the thirty-seven more years he had left to live were to seem quite flat, although, in reality, they were marked by a growing family and dwindling resources, so that Hunt was compelled to look frenetically for any opportunity for making money. 2. In 1816 Hunt’s suburban cottage near Hampstead Heath was the meeting place for a group of young literary hopefuls, among them Keats, and for a brief period, Shelley too. Hunt had begun his literary career as a devotee of the late eighteenth-century writers. In his Feast of the Poets (1811) – like Byron in English Bards – he awarded pride of place to the Augustans and banished Wordsworth from the poetic ‘Feast’. In 1815, along with others, he turned against Napoleon, now judged to have betrayed the cause of freedom. The following year, he published The Story of Rimini, his most famous poem. This adaptation of the story of Paolo and Francesca as told by Dante in the Divina Commedia is a foretaste of what was to become Hunt’s prevailing interest in medieval and early Renaissance Italian culture. The poem is written, not in terzine but in agile couplets (imitated by Keats in Endymion), and creates an ingenious anti-classic friction – between matter, prosody, vocabulary and style – that smacks of Byron and of Browning’s early manner, and was consequently misunderstood for many years. Hunt wrote a few more poems, often adaptations of adaptations, which would seem to indicate a lack of imagination and a reliance on literary sources: his Hero and Leander is taken from Marlowe, and Bacchus and Ariadne is a literal translation of Redi’s Bacco in Toscana, accompanied by paraphrases, echoes and imitations of Chaucer and Spenser in particular.1 He compiled lengthy paraphrases of Italian classics preceded by wide-ranging critical and biographical introductions. But there is a fourth important event in Hunt’s life: I mentioned it above, but it calls for further attention. I refer to the group of young poets that revolved around Hunt, referred to as the ‘Cockney School’. This slightly contemptuous label was first used of them 1

The Paolo and Francesca episode in Dante was a favourite with translators: Byron translated and published his version of it, as did Hunt, whose rendering in terzine is both highly readable and ‘faithful’ to Dante’s text. It reflects an obsession with adultery and illicit love which Hunt deals with in his Hero and Leander and in his play, A Legend of Florence (1840).

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by the conservative Blackwood’s in what was one of the many famous literary skirmishes in a series that included the Jacobean ‘war of the theatres’ and that of the Augustan wits. Hunt continued to write tirelessly on just about every possible literary subject up to a few days before he died; he wrote plays, and enjoyed a brief moment of glory on the stage; he edited the plays of other writers, and even brought out a novel of his own. His international standing has been based on an evaluation that runs more or less like this: he wrote in order to make a living and support his family; even given these mitigating circumstances, he is, and remains, a pleasant but mediocre poet, devoid of taste and refinement, and, at worst, decidedly tawdry. His huge production was usually reduced to a handful of anthology pieces.2 His ‘shabby’ art, accompanied by specious humour and sentimentality, sugar-sweet and soon regretted, aroused the indignation of Orwell, who inserted it into the category of ‘good bad poetry’.3 3. Like Southey, Hunt is saved by his prose, scattered throughout a forest of essays and articles published in his weeklies and quarterlies, and collected, in his lifetime, in several volumes. Hunt’s main vaunt as an essayist is his variety, the fruit of his eclectic, ecumenical spirit, especially appreciated because it does not pretend to teach anything. One reads for the pure ‘pleasure of the text’. Orwell mentions Hunt only once in his correspondence – as quoted above – but Hunt is, after all, his literary forebear (I am thinking, specifically, of Orwell’s ‘Why I Write’) in his aim to combine a love of beauty with political engagement. The word ‘variety’ implies interaction between the spheres of literature, music and the visual arts, and in this Hunt was more qualified than his predecessors. At the same time, his essays are not for the few but for the many, and many are the subjects and themes touched upon with differing stylistic nuances: Lamb is there with his pleasing Biedermeier touch, his idiosyncrasies and compulsions, little

2

3

Just recently, plans to publish his complete works have been abandoned, so that the scholar must make do with The Selected Writings of Leigh Hunt, ed. M. EberleSinatra, R. Morrison and J. Strachan, 6 vols, London 2003. However, two reliable biographies came out in 2005. OCE, vol. II, 226. Orwell cites ‘Jenny kiss’d me when we met’ (a totally innocent kiss from Carlyle’s wife).

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everyday rituals typical of the loiterer.4 Hunt’s career was rounded off by an autobiography, completed in 1850, and still read with great pleasure. To my mind, the essay by Hunt that most deserves attention is the preface to his Imagination and Fancy (1844). This preface is entitled ‘An Answer to the Question What is Poetry’, and, despite the promise inherent in the title, is today almost totally unknown even to the academic world, though 100 years ago it was considered sufficiently important to be included in English Critical Essays5 along with pieces by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Shelley, Hazlitt, Newman and Carlyle. 4. The essay in question bears the mark of Coleridge in two senses: everything in it revolves around the concepts of fancy and imagination, and, above all, it applies fixed aesthetic coordinates to prove that Coleridge’s verse is the most functional, versatile, plastic and wonderfully unitary of the whole Romantic movement. In this respect it is exactly antithetical to Augustan ‘artificiality’. Hunt’s essay differs from similar aesthetic tracts by Mill, Peacock, or Macaulay on several counts: he starts by addressing the age-old equation between truth and beauty, but adds a third, hitherto unthought-of element, the ‘power’ of poetry, which he sees as acting on the reader as well as on the poet. In this he seems to prepare the ground for a future aesthetics of reception. He states explicitly that the end of poetry is pleasure (though he backtracks on this towards the end), thus underlining the hedonistic aspect of literary creativity. In many ways, this is groundbreaking work – no vague, generalized discourse, but a detailed analysis of poetic technique, language and function, with some notable terminological advances. In this sense, Hunt is light-years away from Carlyle, and his idea of the poet-prophet formulated only four years earlier in Heroes and HeroWorship. In fact, when speaking of variety in poetry, Hunt uses a term which will become part and parcel of formalist and structuralist vocabulary – ‘modulation’. He is one of the first to perceive and analyse the articulation of sounds, and to attempt an albeit rudimentary phonological and 4 5

For example, the essays in which he gives a survey of the books on the shelves of his library, or the sketches ‘about town’, or the ‘portraits’ of the cooing pigeon, or the fireside cat, or the ‘dissertation’ on hats, new and old. Ed. E. D. Jones, Oxford 1916.

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phonosymbolic analysis of the poetic text. For example, he says of a passage in Christabel that ‘the very smoothness and gentleness of the limbs is in the series of the letter l’s’. Then again, he invents an embryonic functional approach – a detailed description of the conception of the work, its structure, the relation of the various parts that make up the whole, the way it functions, or, in more modern terms, the agreement between different layers of the poetic composition. Like Coleridge, he distinguishes between fancy and imagination, but is more analytical in his examination of metaphor as the preferred vehicle for the imagination – metaphor, which for him represents an abrupt leap and change from ordinary perception. Similar avant-garde insights coexist in the essay with more Victorian ideas; and there are also echoes of and references to other aesthetic conventions. He contrasts poetry with music and painting, and pronounces them inferior; he also distances, as Mill did, poetry from science.6 Mill cited as an example the different emotional and linguistic reactions aroused by the sight of a lion in a zoologist, on the one hand, and a poet on the other. His point was that poetry describes not what actually exists, but what is seen as existing. Hunt takes the example of a lily: a botanist or gardener will refer to it using its scientific name; Ben Jonson, or another poet, might call it simply, the ‘flower of light’. Hunt also inserts a clear allusion to the evolution of history and human society, similar to that proposed by Macaulay and famously theorized by Peacock, according to whom the poetry of untransposed truth – as in Homer – flourishes in primitive, ‘undissociated’ societies. Following on from this axiom, Hunt declares Shakespeare to be inferior to Homer, ‘because of that incessant activity or superfoetation of thought, a little less of which might be occasionally desired even in his plays’. He declares in passing that Shakespeare is the greatest ‘whole’ poet and attacks Donne precisely on the basis of the principle according to which thought, of itself, is not enough to make poetry if imagination is lacking. The central part of the essay – in truth, far too long – illustrates the way poetry works, especially as regards metaphor; ‘fancy’ is seen as imagination’s younger sister; both are ‘analogizing’ faculties, 6

Volume 4, § 41.4.

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‘sympathetic’ perceptive organs, but fancy is playful, capricious, artificial, and is expressed by means of superficial wit. Hunt goes on to examine, in greater depth, aspects of rhyme and rhythm. Here he anticipates not only the structuralists (the functions of these elements and their contribution to the overall meaning of the text), but also the question of syllabic versus quantitative metrics and the ‘sprung rhythm’ of Hopkins. He foreshadows Hopkins’s theory of the displacement, acceleration and deceleration of stress as function of meaning and rhetorical effectiveness, and cites the comparison with music, in which up to twenty notes of different value can be contained in a single bar. Like Hopkins, Hunt cites Dryden, in whom all inversion has a function, and in the name of rhythmic and prosodic variety, the antidote for monotony, counters him with Pope. He reflects on the octosyllabic line, ideal for ‘namby-pamby’, and used to great effect only by Coleridge in Christabel, where tempo, not the number of syllables, is key, and where we find pauses and omissions, much like in a piece of music. The conclusion is that versification is not something tacked onto a text; nor is rhyme, a major tool for the poet. As to the theory of poetry as pleasure and aimed at aesthetic enjoyment, Hunt, as I mentioned, changes his mind at the end. That theory was limited, from the very start, by the demands of ‘truthfulness’, not in moral terms but from a factual, scientific point of view. Hunt’s indebtedness to contemporary canons emerges in the final page, when the tone becomes rarefied and abstract. He reminds the reader of the temporal context in which the poet writes: he works at his art in a period in which this very art is despised; a man’s worth is calculated by his contribution to the store of ‘useful knowledge’. He admonishes that the poet is not at all indifferent to the benefits brought by progress, but aims higher, and has a wider concept of the public good. The ending is a delightful, ironic pre-Arnoldian critique of philistinism, represented by the ‘two-ideaed man’, one for the steam engine the other for its inventor. Hunt recaps on the invention by means of a complex, sophisticated syllogism that demolishes the utilitarian logic behind the contempt for poetry, the ‘inventor’ of which was not a ‘button-maker’: a nobleman first thought of it and a captain tried it out. The inspirer of the aforesaid nobleman was Bacon, who held that poetry ‘had something of the divine in it’ and is necessary for human beings.

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§ 229. Peacock* The son of a merchant, brought up by his mother after his father died (the child was three), and educated privately, Thomas Love Peacock (1785– 1866) was a voracious reader, and, despite not having been to university, built up in the course of time a truly encyclopaedic storehouse of knowledge. By the time he was twenty-seven he had published two volumes of poetry; one of them, Rododaphne, is one of the many laments for the death of Pan and the old gods deriving from the famous fantasy by Heine.1 The songs inserted in his satires and prose fantasies display a fine, though caustic, poetic gift, as do a number of lampoons against celebrities from the world of art, politics and business. He struck up a friendship with Shelley, largely, many thought, because the two were so completely different on all fronts.2 His later biography offers little of interest, although he lived until

*

Peacock’s novels have not been collected in a recent edition. Letters, ed. N. A. Joukovsky, 2 vols, Oxford 2001. B. Cellini, Thomas Love Peacock, Roma 1937; O. P. Campbell, Thomas Love Peacock, London 1953; J. I. M. Stewart, Thomas Love Peacock, London 1963; C. Van Doren, The Life of Thomas Love Peacock, New York 1966; L. Madden, Thomas Love Peacock, London 1967; C. Dawson, Thomas Love Peacock, London and New York 1968, and His Fine Wit: A Study of Thomas Love Peacock, London 1970; H. Mills, Peacock: His Circle and His Age, Cambridge 1969, Felton 1973; Peacock: The Satirical Novels: A Casebook, ed. L. Sage, London 1976; M. Butler, Peacock Displayed, London 1979; B. Burns, The Novels of Thomas Love Peacock, London 1985; S. D. Sharma, Thomas Love Peacock: As a Novelist, Delhi 1986; J. Mulvihill, Thomas Love Peacock, Boston, MA 1987; M. A. McKay, Peacock’s Progress: Aspects of Artistic Development in the Novels of Thomas Love Peacock, Uppsala 1992; G. Persico, Ascesa e declino dell’uomo di sentimenti: saggio su Mackenzie, Godwin, Peacock, Bari 1996. 

1

Volume 4, § 67.1, for Barrett Browning’s ‘The Dead Pan’. Calidore, an 1816 fragment (the title is from Spenser), is practically the only instance in nineteenth-century Arthurian literature to use the device of ‘time travelling’. The hero is a knight sent as an emissary to nineteenth-century England from an island inhabited by the gods of Ancient Greece and several survivors from the court of King Arthur. Both groups await the right time for their return. Peacock uses this situation to criticize the destruction of Greek serenity by the Christian religion. Later in the story, Calidore, the son of a converted Puritan and a nymph (yet another version of the Swiftian or Voltairean ingénu), arrives in England, where he is introduced to paper money. Peacock reminisces on the poet in Memoirs of Shelley (1858–1862).

2

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he was eighty. He managed to live by his pen – but there is a huge gap in his bibliography between 1831 and 1861 – thanks also to a sinecure with the East India Company that he held from 1819. The only event of any importance in his later life was the marriage of his eldest daughter to the novelist, Meredith, who portrayed their unhappy union in Modern Love. As a poet-turned-novelist, Peacock resembles Scott, while his career, saving the end, coincides in chronological terms with that of Jane Austen. In actual fact, Peacock is like none of his contemporaries: his novels are totally and uniquely ‘Peacockian’. What makes them unique is soon said: they contain some of the ingredients of the typical novel, but not others; they are ‘conversation novels’ set in the present (except for two, oddly transposed to the sixth and twelfth centuries); they are consequently dialogue-rich, but the dialogues serve not to advance the action but to hold it back by means either of abstruse debates on the meaning of life and similar impossible subjects of investigation, or mere tittle-tattle dragged on page after page for no apparent reason. His plots are a pretext for the exchange of opinions on this or that political party, or some particular point of erudition, all in the setting of sumptuous banquets hosted by munificent Amphitryons. The only contemporary author in any way like him is Landor with his Imaginary Conversations. If Peacock’s way was prepared for him by one or two predecessors, he was followed by a veritable host of imitators. In the eccentricity of his method, he is the last link in a chain that begins with Plato and Lucian of Samosata and continues through the medieval débats and Rabelais. His pedantic learning links him with Thomas Browne and Burton; nearer in time to him are Smollett with his caricatures and Fielding’s parson with a bee in his bonnet and knife and spoon in his hand. It seems to me, however, that it is Sterne that most resembles Peacock, not because of his mental associationism, but for his various eccentrics and their hobbyhorses, like Uncle Toby. From ‘Peacock junction’ different routes fan out – Dickens and his Sketches by Boz; the early Thackeray; Mallock, followed at a distance by Firbank; Huxley; the Joyce of the ‘banquets of languages’ and of the discussion in the library in Ulysses. In the very heart of the nineteenth century, Peacock worked away, deaf to the siren-call of serial publication that captured almost all the ‘sketchers’ (that’s how Dickens and Thackeray began their careers) and turned them into bestselling authors, with all the inevitable compromises this entailed. Peacock,

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instead, remained what he was: a precision artist, capable of turning out perfect little novels that were the delight of generations of readers until at least the end of the nineteenth century. They are out of fashion now, and gather dust on library shelves round the English-speaking world. If any interest in them survives, it is as a kind of cult, because the game in itself still works as long as the targets of his satire are recognizable, identified by means of telling nicknames, hilarious caricatures of familiar historical figures (the satire works less when the butts are anonymous or forgotten). Like the true satirist he is, Peacock destroys; he does not rebuild. He is, if you like, a slightly softer Swift, who takes pleasure in parody in its roughest form, which is that of a graffiti or a scoring. Peacock is out to kill; he has no point to make because his purpose is to ‘unmake’ all: he invokes a retreat from industrial civilization to a world of pastoral simplicity, but cares nothing for the ideals of chivalry; he criticizes the present but decries the Golden Age. He is changeable, and will think nothing of sympathizing with the object of his attacks: like, for example, Romanticism. 2. Headlong Hall (1816), Peacock’s first, and therefore freshest novel, is short enough to be read at one sitting (a Peacock novel is enjoyable when it is less than 100 pages long). The foreword deals with the ethical responsibility of the satirist, who must target those human vices that are immutable, and which, if knocked down, rise again, stronger than ever. It is difficult to say exactly what kind of novel Headlong Hall is: it is obviously not an ordinary one. It reads like an advance copy of a typical Victorian Christmas story. The framework is a party held in the mansion of Squire Headlong, a dilettante bibliophile and intellectual; similar convivial gatherings were to be a feature of Pickwick Papers, published only twenty years later. Indeed two of the four people sitting round the table make great show of their local accents, one Scottish, the other Welsh (a distant future relation are the Joycean ‘banquets’ because of new coinages and scraps of different languages all mixed up together). It has been said – wrongly – that Peacock stands on the sidelines of the debates in his novels, acting like an umpire: every satirist, at heart, desires to maintain the status quo and even sees the human race as irretrievably flawed. The debate involves three politely opposing positions: the belief in man’s continuous progress towards perfection; the opposite, a conviction of the steady decline of human civilization; the possibility and necessity of mediating between these two extreme points of view. If Peacock

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did have any real target in mind, it was the guru of the Romantics, William Godwin, who, in his Enquiry had announced the unstoppable march of the human race towards perfection.3 Peacock cannot seem to rid himself of the awful doubt that, in fact, things are getting worse, despite all the talk to the contrary. Everything in the novel is sketchy, except the dialogues, and maybe one should not protest too much if the characters are only unsubstantial mouthpieces for ideas. Yet, in places, Peacock shows that he is a first-class humorist, for example when, at the arrival of the coach at the post stop, the curate sprains his ankle in his haste to get out and sit down to satisfy his voracious appetite. In his next novel, Melincourt (1817), much longer and therefore much heavier going, Peacock seems to prophesy the absurdity of Ionesco in Sir Oran Haut-ton, an orang-utan that the hero Forester has educated to the point that he is human in everything except the ability to speak. The orang is elected to Parliament in a rotten borough (where there is only one elector). Peacock’s intent appears to be to propose an extreme example of the ‘noble savage’ and, at the same time, have a shy at the English electoral system, which was itself to become a question of fierce debate right up to the First Reform Bill of 1832. However, this is not the only subject of contention: the dialogues crackle with shots aimed at the three great Romantic turncoats, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Southey; and Forester finds an antagonist in the Malthusian, Mr Fax. Nightmare Abbey (1818) features, behind allusive aliases, the Shelley of 1814, torn between the love for two different women, and Byron at his most melancholic, singing one of Peacock’s most famous songs. Nightmare Abbey is a faint-hearted debunking of the Gothic novel, with its gloomy castle and mysterious, morbid love affairs. There are a few extremely effective moments, as when an ichthyologist waits patiently for a mermaid to emerge from the waves, or when Scythrop (Shelley) loses both of his women, and, instead of despairing like Werther, asks for a bottle of Madeira. 3. Maid Marian (1822) presents the story of Robin Hood in the form of an operetta, with duets, terzetti and so on. Peacock here pokes fun at the current craze for things medieval (Scott’s Ivanhoe had just been published). The Misfortunes of Elphin (1829), set in ancient Wales, tells of the 3

§ 170.1.

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invasion of the kingdom by sea-marauders made possible by the drunkenness of the guardian of the coast (the reference is to a speech by Canning). The Misfortunes is another jibe at the contemporary infatuation with King Arthur and escapist literature in general. In Crotchet Castle (1831) Peacock seems to look back to Headlong Hall: the visitors to the castle once again represent the main Romantic poets and several popular politicians of the day – among them, another greedy priest – all gathered to debate the issue of conservatism versus progressiveness. Peacock more than hints at his personal scepticism regarding reform and populism in the finale, when the castle is stormed by the populace. Gryll Grange (1861), according to some Peacock enthusiasts his masterpiece, revolves around yet another debate on the Victorian fixation with science, technology and asceticism. 4. In ‘The Four Ages of Poetry’ (1820) Peacock converses, through an intermediary, with Shelley, who responded with his The Defence of Poetry. Like Macaulay – but arriving at completely different conclusions – Peacock discusses, not a fixed, synchronic vision of poetry, but one that changes as society progresses and changes. The iron age corresponds to the stage when ‘rude bards celebrate in rough numbers the exploits of ruder chiefs’. The king, or other victor in the tribal struggles for power, uses the poet as an instrument wherewith to magnify his achievements and consolidate his power: ‘poetry is thus in origin panegyrical’. The poet is the only historian of the age, the only repository of knowledge, as well as being moralist, theologian and legislator. The poet of the golden age, in turn, takes his material from the previous iron age. Poetry begins to be retrospective. The poet is still a panegyrist, but praises his lord by extolling his ancestors. Concurrently, poetry starts to demand greater intelligence and technical skills. This is the age in which poetry reaches perfection, the age of Homer: now new directions must be sought, love poetry, for example, or – with the advance of reason and a greater interest in facts rather than in fiction – it becomes history. Herodotus is as much of a poet compared with Thucydides as Homer is compared with Herodotus, whose History is almost a poem in itself. In the silver age, attention to form reaches its zenith, but the poetry behind or within the form is lifeless and near extinction. Moral poetry survives, because it tempers the severity of reason with feeling and imagination, which, in fact, become dominant: ‘the empire of thought is withdrawn from poetry’. The sequence, in short, is this: ‘the poet of the

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age of iron celebrates the achievements of his contemporaries; the poet of the age of gold celebrates the heroes of the age of iron; the poet of the age of silver re-casts the poems of the age of gold’. The age of brass rejects the refinement of the age of silver, professes a return to nature, and invokes a new golden age. This is the second childhood of poetry (Peacock calls it the ‘Nonnic’ age), while the age of gold is exemplified by Homer and that of silver by Virgil. Peacock sees this evolution as cyclical, and applies his analysis to modern poetry. At the end of the Dark Ages courtly poets took the place of the ‘demi-gods’ of Greek poetry and sang of Charlemagne and the paladins. This second iron age was followed by a golden age permeated by Greek and Latin poetry and at the same time it gave free rein to the imagination in the use of time and space (Ariosto, Shakespeare). Milton comes between the golden and the silver, the latter being represented by Pope, Goldsmith, Collins and Gray. The Enlightenment turned poets into pure intellect without imagination. When Peacock gets to the Romantics (he calls them ‘the patriarchs of the age of brass’), the essay really becomes what it was meant to be all along: a bitterly sarcastic attack on the entire Romantic movement. The Romantics, says Peacock, are fanatical innovators, and exponents of poetic impressionism arising from scenes of nature. Wordsworth is, once again, the main target, since he advocated a ‘return to nature’. Peacock clearly echoes Macaulay when he states that, while scientific and general knowledge is on the increase, the poet is forced to rummage through the rubbish of the past in order to turn out pseudo-poetry for the ‘grown babies of the age’: ‘A poet in our times is a semi-barbarian in a civilized community […] The march of his intellect is like that of a crab, backward’. The uncoupling of philosopher from poet is inevitable, as is the dissociation between poetry and contemporary thought. Poetry is, for the present age, only ornamental, and our needs are amply met by the great poetry of the past, written when the artist and society lived in perfect harmony. In the past, poetry challenged the intellect; now, in an age when reason has more than come of age, new poetry is nothing but childish babbling that has no relevance whatsoever to the serious issues of life. Peacock’s vision is eminently utilitarian – or rationalistic – and antiidealistic; his objective is to underline that all activity should, in some way, contribute to the store of ‘valuable knowledge’. Poetry contributes only to the intellectual degradation of those who read it.

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§ 230. Cobbett The most ‘literary’ of political activists at the turn of the eighteenth century, William Cobbett (1762–1835) is an interesting example of lifelong contrariness: while most of his contemporaries (at least the artists and writers) were enthusiastic supporters of the ideals of the French Revolution, Cobbett began his adult life as an anti-Jacobin Tory, and, as such, was a favourite of Pitt and his entourage. In the course of time, however, he changed direction and ended up at the opposite pole: he became a radical, but an English one, basically conservative still, but in favour of reform. He hated modernity and progress, and advocated a return to an agrarian model of civilization, as in pre-Reformation England. He did not contest the right to own property; he argued in favour of decentralized administration (devolution) and already saw London as a monster of corrupt bureaucracy whose only apparent raison d’être was to starve the people into submission. Born in the heart of Surrey, the son of a farmer, and a farmer himself, he soon showed his mettle when, after being discharged from the army, he accused his commanding officers of embezzlement, and was forced to flee to France. For the following thirty years, his life was one long sequence of daredevilry and foolhardy challenges aimed at attracting the attention and gaining the support of the Establishment, whatever party was in power. From France, he went to America, where he set up a pro-government, anti-Jacobin, anti-republican paper (he wrote under the pseudonym, ‘Porcupine’). He was tried on a charge of libel, and returned to England in 1800. Here he caused a stir with his denunciations of several leading politicians and his earnest appeal to Parliament for the abolition of flogging in the army. This cost him two years in prison, during which he continued to write for the Political Register (which he himself had started and which was to die with him in 1835).1 In 1817, Cobbett fled to America again, this time from his creditors; when he returned it was with the remains of Thomas Paine. One of his most drawn-out campaigns was against the anachronism of the ‘rotten boroughs’; Cobbett was elected to the first Parliament after the 1832 Reform Bill. 1

With the cover price reduced to twopence, the papers reached a circulation of 40,000 copies.

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2. Rural Rides2 is a collection of articles from the Political Register, beginning in 1821. Most of them are only a few pages long, and are written in the form of a diary (the style is minimal, telegraphic, and the grammar is often approximate). All together, they present a host of careful, precise, often ecstatic descriptions of nature (vegetation, trees, fields, crops) and weather (sun, rain, clouds, mist, frost), written so as to give the impression of live reporting. His encounters with farmworkers and the sight of their dreadful living conditions spark off a series of tirades against capitalists and landlords, and the abandonment of the countryside instead of repopulation publicized by the government. Cobbett uses a reference to the cooperation between workers and masters in the Middle ages to underline his criticism of the contemporary ruling class. Time and again, Pitt is pointed to as responsible for this situation. Between 1824 and 1827, Cobbett published several pamphlets aimed expressly against the Reformation, which, in his eyes, had reduced England and Ireland to a state of poverty and want. Rural Rides is a pioneering text in at least two senses: it is a non-personal diary that concentrates on objective reality and offers examples of word-paintings of natural and atmospheric phenomena, much like what will later be found in Ruskin, Hopkins, Edward Thompson (in the same part of England as Cobbett) and Orwell in his hop-picking. Cobbett’s Weltanschauung was fundamentally conservative and pro- or pseudo-Catholic – he decried the politics of Henry and Elizabeth – but he was not, in actual fact, a Catholic. Nonetheless, he embodied the same turning back to the Middle Ages as was to pervade the Oxford Movement – in Newman and Keble, in Ruskin and, especially and most clearly, in Hopkins. According to Ian Jack, Cobbett foreshadows the reactionary dream of T. S. Eliot.3 In his own small way, he belongs with those great, authoritative figures – like Dr Johnson, Hopkins, or Orwell – endowed with a vision that embraces history, philosophy, religion, politics, literature, and even linguistics. The issues he campaigned on have long since been forgotten, but Cobbett continues to be read for his vigorous, lively prose style. 2 3

It is significant that the excursions should be described as ‘rural’, and that they were on horseback, and not in a coach or on foot. JEL, 316–17.

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§ 231. Romantic drama This title refers to the theatre of the second half of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth, up to the accession of Victoria. This period is, in itself, devoid of great names and great plays. Only the attempts at writing for the stage made by each of the major poets of the time are of any interest, though they are all, without exceptions, qualitatively inferior to the poetry, be it lyrical or satirical, produced by the same authors. Many literary historians admit to being like archaeologists intent on digging up long-buried texts that may turn out to be worthless. Although it required specific skills and abilities, playwriting was, in fact, indulged in, indiscriminately, by novelists, poets and essayists of either sex. Most of the many, mediocre, plays of the period have rightly been forgotten, but there are small survivors – a particular character, a catch-phrase, a situation, or just a curiosity. In other cases, plays are remembered because of the burning issues they deal with – for example, the defence of the Jews in a work by Richard Cumberland (1794).1 Hannah More (1745–1833) began her career with a pastoral drama written for the edification of young girls, then turned to adaptations of Latin plays aimed at teaching the importance of a sense of duty. In Percy (1777), a tragedy set at the time of the Crusades, she presents a rulebook of behaviour for parents and children, with a final massacre brought about by a series of unfortunate misunderstandings. Compared with Barbauld, More was much more circumspect in her criticism of Paine, aimed at persuading the working class to put aside all radical ideas and place all their hope in the Bible. A novel of hers, written in 1809, about a bachelor’s successful search for the ideal wife, is enlivened by a certain Jane Austen-like humour. Thomas Holcroft (1745– 1809) tried his hand at playwriting after doing a variety of jobs; a rationalist and atheist, with radical leanings, he was imprisoned, unjustly, for his convictions. His works have recently been republished, and he is, consequently, in the process of being ‘rediscovered’. Despite the misfortunes of his life, he wrote optimistic, sentimental plays, all with a happy ending. The most famous, and best, one is The Road to Ruin (1792), which deals 1

§ 140.3.

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with the world of finance, and features a number of well-drawn satirical characters and some funny lines of dialogue. George Colman the younger (1762–1836, son of the homonymous manager of Covent Garden) adapted Godwin’s Caleb Williams for the stage, but is best known for reviving operettas and operas with exotic settings. His most characteristic work is Inkle and Yarico (1787), all about the dilemmas of a young Englishman in Barbados, who loves the dusky Yarico, but is betrothed to the governor’s daughter. Of the three plays by Thomas Morton (1764–1838), the third, Speed the Plough (1798), is famous for introducing and making a household word of Mrs Grundy, who came to represent the worst form of hypocrisy and self-righteousness. One cause for alarm for playwrights in England was the opening of the borders to German and French plays, which lasted until the middle of the Victorian period and the arrival on the scene of Charles Reade. The German, Kotzebue, provided the raw material for dozens of adaptations, and the French author, Guilbert de Pixérécourt, introduced melodrama to the English stage. 2. In the forty years between 1790 and 1830, war, at first, kept the theatres empty; after 1815, the typical theatre-goer no longer belonged to the aristocracy or the upper class, but was often just a ‘man in the street’, looking for a couple of hours of entertainment. Among the structural changes of this period were the abolition of the protruding stage and the old proscenium, gas lighting, and a huge increase in stage scenery and effects. Great actors, like Kemble, Kean and Macready, continued to overshadow the author, also in economic terms. Farces and melodramas were the most sought-after forms of entertainment, while tragedy and classical plays had little appeal. The great poets stubbornly went on writing plays for practice, which they sometimes managed to have staged. For the plays of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Byron, and for those by other, minor, writers whose principal genre is not the theatre, I refer the reader to the specific sections in this work. The tragedies of the period repeated in part the characteristics of late seventeenth-century drama, with its bombast and all sorts of neo-Gothic tricks. One of the reasons why the plays of this period fail to work in general is that they strive towards the poetic rather than the dramatic, so that action as such is either lacking altogether or, at

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any rate, insufficient to maintain the interest of the reader/spectator.2 This was the objection raised by Hazlitt to Adelaide (1814), by the Irish politician and diplomat, Richard Lalor Sheil (1791–1851), on the after-effects of the French Revolution, and a later pièce on the Moors in Spain. Henry Hart Milman (1791–1868), an Oxford-educated Anglican priest, subsequently a vicar in Reading, wrote a tragedy entitled Fazio (1815), followed by four more adaptations (the last on Anne Boleyn), besides a Miltonic epic set in the fifth century.3 James Sheridan Knowles (1784–1862) was practically the only playwright to rid his work of redundant Elizabethan-style decoration, starting with Virginius (1820), and other works on subjects from Roman history. The problem is, shorn of all superfluous ornament and embellishment, they end up by being insipid and trite.

2 3

JEL, 179–80. As an expert on the history of the Jews and Latin Christianity, as well as an editor of Gibbon, Milman adopted a semi-rationalistic ploy to justify the belief in miracles: they were accepted without much questioning at the time, but in fact were not miracles as such but instances of self-suggestion inspired by God.

Index of names

(In this and in the Thematic index, references, including those to names and topics appearing in footnotes, will be to section and sub-section numbers) Abbott, Claude Collier  220.2 Abrams, Meyer Howard  158.3; 158.6; 173.3; 221 Achilles  204.4; 225.2 Ackroyd, Peter  149.1 Adam  13.1; 26.3; 26.6; 35.1; 35.4; 35.6; 35.7; 36.2; 37.1; 37.2; 37.3; 38.1; 38.2; 38.3; 39; 77.3; 173.2; 212.3 Adam, Adolphe Charles  203.2 Addison, Joseph  12.1; 31.4; 72.3; 73.2; 73.5; 75.3; 75.5; 76.3; 78.1; 82.1; 89.3; 96; 97.1; 98.1; 100.4; 102; 107.2; 108.2; 110.5; 113.3; 113.4; 119.1; 133.1; 156; 216.1; 226.2 Aelianus, Claudius  44.4 Aeneas  7.2; 36.1; 62.3; 78.3 Aeschylus  47.5; 142.4; 191.3; 191.4 Aesop  78.1; 117.2 Æthelstan, Saxon king  220.2 Agrippa, Heinrich Cornelius  18.2; 212.1 Ainsworth, William Harrison  206.2 Ajax 62.3 Akenside, Mark  110.2; 216.2 Alabaster, William  2.4 Albertus Magnus  212.1 Alciati, Andrea  21 Aldrovandi, Ulisse  44.4 Alexander, William  3; 6.1 Alexander the Great  51.5; 52.1; 93.2; 122 Alfieri, Vittorio  200.4; 204.2; 213.1 Alfred the Great, King of Wessex  1.3; 35.5

Algarotti, Francesco  136.2 Alighieri, Dante  7.2; 31.1; 31.4; 35.1; 35.3; 36.1; 37.2; 42.2; 43.3; 47.2; 116.1; 116.2; 129.4; 173.1; 174.1; 177.1; 188.1; 189.1; 189.3; 192.1; 193.1; 203.3; 205.3; 215.1; 215.3; 217; 228.2 Allen, Walter  71.2; 89.4; 168.3 Amis, Kingsley  160.5 Anacreon 218.1 Anchises 7.2 Andreini, Giovanni Battista  35.1 Andrewes, Lancelot  29.2; 29.3; 30.1 Angelico, Fra (Guido di Pietro)  173.1 Anne Stuart, Queen of Great Britain  1.10; 1.11; 45.1; 64.1; 72.2; 72.3; 72.4; 73.1; 73.3; 73.6; 75.2; 76.3; 77.1; 78.1; 80; 90.1; 109.1; 132.2 Anstey, Christopher  126.2 Anthony à Wood  9.1; 9.2; 44.3 Apollo  8.2; 27.3; 49.3; 175.1; 195.2; 197.1 Aram, Eugene  170.3; 223.1 Arbuthnot, John  76.2; 76.3; 77.1; 80; 96.3 Archer, William  60.2 Ariadne 222.3 Ariosto, Ludovico  35.3; 50.1; 123.2; 205.2; 207; 210.2; 214.2; 229.4 Aristenetus 141.1 Aristophanes 205.2 Aristotle  41.2; 47.6; 68.2; 76.3; 79; 130.3; 158.3 Armour, Jean  172.2

608/II Arne, Thomas  106.1 Arnold, Matthew  2.7; 47.4; 47.5; 47.7; 55.2; 68.3; 74.2; 74.3; 91.2; 96.1; 101.1; 105.1; 110.5; 113.4; 129.1; 129.3; 158.6; 178.3; 178.4; 183.4; 189.4; 195.4; 200.3; 204.4; 221 Arnold, Thomas  118.3 Arthur, King  35.1; 37.2; 47.6; 127.7; 145.2; 195.2; 207; 229.1; 229.3 Ascham, Roger  44.4; 70.2; 202.1 Ashley, Maurice  1.1; 1.5; 1.6; 1.9; 50.1 Ashmole, Elias  43.4 Astell, Mary  71.2; 71.3; 71.5; 136.1 Aubin, Penelope  71.5 Aubrey, John  2.7; 8.1; 40.2; 44.1; 44.3 Auden, Wystan Hugh  12.2; 151.2; 157.2; 189.4; 194.1; 227 Augustus (Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus), Roman Emperor  52.1; 73.1; 139.1 Austen, Cassandra  165.1 Austen, Jane  71.4; 113.1; 116.3; 141.3; 158.5; 158.6; 159.2; 160–5; 166.1; 168.1; 168.2; 229.1; 231.1 Bach, Johann Sebastian  42.3 Bachelard, Gaston  160.4 Bacigalupo, Massimo  183.1; 184.3 Backscheider, Paula R.  88.1 Bacon, Francis  15.2; 23.2; 41; 42.3; 43.3; 45.1; 62.2; 64.1; 100.1; 215.3; 228.4 Bacon, Roger  68.4 Bage, Robert  168.4 Bagehot, Walter  101.1; 189.4 Bailey, Philip James  220.2 Bakhtin, Mikhail  35.4; 89.2; 206.3 Ballantyne, John  208.1; 211.6 Balzac, Honoré de  119.1; 145.4; 167 Banks, Theodore Howard  28.1 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia  120.1; 185.3; 222.1; 231.1 Barberini, Francesco, Cardinal  34.1

Index of names Barclay, Alexander  21 Barclay, John  44.2 Bardotti, Marta  86 Baretti, Giuseppe  98.1; 109.2; 133.2 Barham, Richard  214.4 Barker, Jane 71.5 Barker, Juliet  178.1 Barnard, John  196.3 Barnes, William  219.1 Barnett, George Leonard  224.1 Barrell, John  219.1 Barrett Browning, Elizabeth  11.3; 160.5; 202.2; 222.2; 229.1 Barrow, Samuel  35.3 Barry, Elizabeth  53.1 Bartoli, Daniello  29.3 Basire, James  174.1 Baudelaire, Charles  8.1 Baugh, Albert Croll  4.2; 35.2; 71.5; 74.1; 146.4; 155.2; 184.1; 214.2; 215.1; 217; 220.1 Baxter, Richard  2.4; 12.3; 44.1 Bayle, Pierre  41.2 Beardsley, Aubrey  142.3; 144.1 Beattie, James  154.1 Beaumont, Francis  7.1; 46.1; 196.4; 214.2; 220.2 Beaupuy, Michel  182.2 Becket, Thomas  220.2 Beckett, Samuel  42.1; 44.4; 113.1; 144.3; 204.4 Beckford, William  73.1; 141.3; 144; 208.1 Beddoes, Thomas Lovell 220.1; 220.2 Bede, the Venerable  30.1 Beer, John B.  188.3 Beerbohm, Max  142.3 Beethoven, Ludwig  van  106.5; 158.7; 172.2; 205.4 Behn, Aphra  45.2; 52.1; 71.2; 71.3; 71.4; 136.1 Bellini, Vincenzo  211.3

Index of names Benjamin, Walter  149.2; 173.1 Bennett, Samuel  161.2 Bentham, Jeremy  41.2; 68.4; 112.2; 137.1; 194.2 Bentley, Richard  67; 75.5 Berdan, J. E.  24 Bergson, Henri  127.3 Berkeley, Anne  22 Berkeley, George  73.4; 100; 102; 106.2; 108.2; 137.2 Berlioz, Hector  200.2; 203.2 Bernhardt-Kabisch, Ernest  214.1; 214.2 Berni, Francesco  109.2; 205.2 Bernini, Gianlorenzo  17.5; 73.6 Betterton, Thomas  46.1; 49.1 Bettinelli, Saverio  109.2 Bickerstaff, Isaac  91.3 Billi, Mirella  212.1 Bindman, David  174.1 Birindelli, Roberto  78.1 Birley, Robert  109.2 Bishop, Elizabeth  12.2 Blackwell, Thomas  73.5 Blair, Hugh  147.1; 147.2 Blair, Robert  110.3; 110.4; 112.4; 132.4; 139.1; 173.1 Blake, William  7.2; 18.2; 19.2; 30.2; 31.4; 43.1; 103; 109.2; 111.2; 146.1; 150.1; 150.4; 158.3; 158.5; 158.7; 171.2; 173–7; 178.2; 179; 180.1; 185.2; 188.3; 189.2; 189.3; 190.1; 195.1; 197.2; 200.4; 204.4; 222.1; 224.1; 228.3 Blessington, Lady (Marguerite Gardiner)  205.1 Bloom, Harold  35.4; 158.1; 173.1; 183.4; 192.2 Bloomfield, Robert  219.1 Blunden, Edmund  109.2; 190.1; 200.4; 219.1; 219.2 Boccaccio, Giovanni  44.4; 47.1; 123.2; 196.1; 203.3; 215.3; 223.2

609/II Boehme, Jacob  103 Boethius, Severinus  11.4 Boileau, Nicolas  45.2; 73.5; 75.2; 75.3; 77.3 Boleyn, Anne  231.2 Bolingbroke, Lord (Henry St John)  72.2; 72.4; 74.1; 81; 113.3; 146.1 Bonaparte, Napoleon  25.4; 134.2; 157.2; 157.3; 200.4; 202.2; 214.3; 215.3; 222.1; 226.2; 228.2 Bond, Edward  152.3 Bonivard (or Bonnivard), François  203.3 Bononcini, Giovanni  97.4 Bordoni, Faustina  78.4 Borgia, Cesare  52.1 Borgia, Lucrezia  203.1 Borromini, Francesco  73.6 Bosch, Hieronymus  73.6 Boswell, James  32.2; 73.3; 131.1; 132.1; 132.2; 133.2; 134; 154.1 Bottrall, Margaret  13.2 Boucher, Catherine  174.1 Bowen, Elizabeth  159.1 Bowles, Caroline Anne  214.1 Bowles, Paul  168.3 Bowles, William Lisle  184.1; 188.3 Bowra, Cecil Maurice  200.4 Boyle, Robert  45.1 Bracegirdle, Anne  46.1; 56.2 Braden, Gordon  11.3 Bradley, Andrew Cecil  226.2 Bradshaw, John  1.8 Bramhall, John, Archbishop of Armagh  68.2 Brawne, Fanny  196.1; 198.2 Brecht, Bertolt  60.1; 78.1; 224.1 Bridges, Robert  12.1; 12.2; 31.4; 110.2; 129.2; 196.4 Bridgwater, Patrick  225.2 Brilli, Attilio  42.4; 91.1 Britten, Benjamin  151.2; 152.2; 152.3

610/II Brome, Alexander  49.2 Brontë, Anne  105.1; 116.2; 145.1; 160.1; 160.2; 165.1; 173.2 Brontë, Charlotte  60.2; 105.1; 116.2; 143.6; 145.1; 145.3; 160.1; 160.2; 160.5; 161.1; 161.2; 165.1; 168.2; 173.2 Brontë, Emily  105.1; 116.2; 129.6; 143.6; 145.1; 145.4; 155.2; 160.1; 160.2; 161.3; 165.1; 173.2; 206.2; 212.2 Brooke, Henry  103 Brooks, Cleanth  25.4 Brooks, Harold Fletcher  63.1 Brougham, Lord (Henry)  227 Brown, Norman Oliver  89.1; 173.4 Brown, Tom  93.5 Browne, Thomas  2.7; 34.2; 41.1; 41.3; 42.2; 42.4; 43; 44.2; 51.4; 66.2; 67; 75.1; 100.2; 188.2; 224.1; 225.3; 229.1 Browne, William  3; 5 Browning, Robert  1.5; 8.3; 19.1; 21; 24; 30.2; 42.1; 51.4; 58.1; 62.3; 63.2; 77.1; 82.2; 101.3; 102; 109.4; 119.1; 120.2; 143.3; 145.1; 145.3; 149.2; 150.2; 151.2; 155.2; 155.3; 167; 172.4; 178.4; 186.3; 189.4; 190.1; 192.4; 195.1; 203.3; 205.3; 207; 215.1; 215.2; 215.3; 217; 220.1; 225.3; 225.4; 228.2 Bruno, Giordano  10.2; 10.4; 26.6; 74.2; 99; 123.3 Brutus, Marcus Junius  73.1; 97.2 Buchanan, George  1.3; 125.2; 209.1 Buckingham, 1st Duke of (George Villiers)  1.3; 1.4; 1.9; 46.2 Buckingham, 2nd Duke of (George Villiers)  50.3; 121.1; 211.4 Buffon, Earl of (Georges-Louis Leclerc)  73.4; 190.3 Bullen, Arthur Henry  5.1; 42.4 Bulwer Lytton, Edward  206.1; 206.2; 222.2 Bunker Wright, Harold  77.2

Index of names Bunyan, John  2.3; 18.3; 21; 30.2; 45.1; 56.5; 69–70; 73.5; 82.2; 83.1; 103; 116.2; 123.3; 162.1; 174.3; 205.5 Buonarroti, Michelangelo  32.4; 112.3; 173.1; 226.2 Bürger, Gottfried August  158.2; 185.2; 207 Burke, Edmund  73.4; 81.2; 111.2; 133.2; 135.2; 139.1; 146; 147.2; 152.2; 152.3; 154.1; 156; 159.2; 169; 171.2; 181.1; 197.2; 212.2 Burlington, 3rd Earl of (Richard Boyle)  73.6; 76.2 Burnet, Gilbert, Archbishop of Salisbury  61.1; 61.2; 64.2 Burnet, Thomas  64.2 73.4; 185.2 Burney, Charles  159.2 Burney, Frances (Fanny)  158.5; 159; 160.2; 161.1; 166.1; 166.4 Burns, Robert  4.2; 6.1; 154.1; 154.3; 155.1; 156; 172; 175.3; 201.2; 219.1 Burton, Robert  14; 32.4; 41.1; 42; 44.2; 44.3; 44.4; 57.2; 62.2; 67; 70.2; 90.1; 127.3; 141.1; 183.1; 224.1; 224.2; 229.1 Busenello, Giovanni Francesco  25.6 Bush, Douglas  25.4; 35.1; 35.2 Bute, Lord ( John Stuart)  111.3; 131.1; 131.2; 135.1 Butler, Marilyn  160.3; 162.2; 166.1 Butler, Samuel  18.2; 24; 50.3; 55.4; 62; 63.1; 70.1; 77.3; 101; 104; 131.1; 150.1; 223.3 Byatt, Antonia S.  19.1 Byrd, Max  85.1 Byrom, John  103 Byron, Allegra  189.2; 203.1 Byron, Lord (George Gordon)  8.2; 24; 42.2; 56.1; 58.1; 62.3; 73.2; 74.2; 75.3; 95.2; 111.3; 123.2; 131.1; 135.2; 141.2; 143.1; 143.6; 144.1; 144.3; 145.1; 145.3; 145.4; 156; 158.1; 158.3; 158.4; 158.5; 160.3; 161.2; 162.3; 165.2; 166.1; 167; 168.4; 170.1; 189.2;

Index of names 189.4; 190.3; 191.1; 191.2; 191.3; 195.1; 195.4; 200–5; 207; 212.1; 212.2; 213.1; 213.2; 214.1; 215.1; 217; 218.1; 218.2; 219.1; 219.2; 220.1; 223.1; 223.2; 223.3; 224.1; 228.1; 228.2; 229.2; 231.2 Caesar, Gaius Julius  25.4; 53.1; 93.2; 97.2; 122; 130.2; 137.2 Cagliostro (Giuseppe Balsamo)  112.1 Cain  174.3; 185.2; 204.4 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro  55.3; 189.3; 194.2 Calhoun, Thomas O.  23.1 Calvin, John  69.1; 90.1; 90.2; 204.4 Campbell, Duncan  82.1 Campbell, Thomas  152.2; 201.2; 216; 217; 222.3 Camus, Jean-Pierre  2.4 Canning, George  229.3 Capell, Edward  148.1 Cappello, Bianca  142.3 Carducci, Giosuè  189.4 Cardwell, Richard Andrew  200.3 Carew, Thomas  2.2; 10; 15.1; 19.2; 40.1; 77.1; 215.2 Carey, John  31.4; 35.4 Carey, Thomas  10.1 Carlo Alberto of Savoy, King of Sardinia 215.3 Carlyle, Thomas  1.7; 19.3; 30.2; 31.4; 34.1; 80; 90; 106.3; 133.2; 167; 172.2; 183.1; 195.1; 200.3; 206.1; 214.1; 214.4; 216.1; 224.1; 228.2; 228.3; 228.4 Caroline of Brandeburg-Ansbach, Queen of Great Britain  72.4 Caroline of Brunswick, Queen of the United Kingdom  192.2 Carr, Robert, Duke of Somerset  1.3 Carroll, John  116.3

611/II Carroll, Lewis  5; 12.2; 89.3; 175.1 Carter, Angela  162.2 Carteret, John (Lord Carteret)  72.4 Cartwright, William  40.1 Cary, Henry Francis  215.1; 217 Caryll, John, the Younger  75.3 Cassiodorus 11.4 Casti, Giovanni Battista  78.1; 205.2 Castlereagh, viscount (Robert Stewart)  157.2; 192.2 Catherine II the Great, Empress of Russia  138; 205.5 Cato, Marcus Porcius  73.1; 96.3; 97.2 Catullus  11.3; 31.3 Cave, Edward  132.3 Cavendish, Margaret (Duchess of Newcastle)  40.2; 45.2; 71.1 Cazamian, Louis  116.1; 226.1 Cecchi, Emilio  189.4; 200.3; 206.1 Cenci, Beatrice  191.5; 191.6 Cenci, Francesco  191.3; 191.5 Centlivre, Susanna  78.1; 140.3 Cervantes, Miguel de  56.2; 56.5; 62.3; 71.4; 71.4; 121.2; 121.4; 123.2; 125.4; 126.1; 145.4; 207; 209.1 Cesarotti, Melchiorre  109.2; 147.2 Chalandritsanos, Lukas  205.1 Chapman, George  50.3; 57.3; 75.5; 121.1; 195.1 Charles of Burgundy, the Bold  211.5; 211.6 Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender (Bonnie Prince Charlie)  72.3; 73.1; 123.6; 209.4 Charles the Great  229.4 Charles I Stuart, King of England  1.3; 1.4; 1.5; 1.6; 1.7; 1.8; 2.2; 6.3; 8.1; 9.1; 10.1; 10.2; 11.3; 15.1; 22; 23.3; 24; 25.4; 27.2; 29.1; 34.2; 35.4; 47.3; 64.1; 72.4; 82.1 Charles II Stuart, King of England  1.4; 1.8; 1.9; 1.10; 22; 25.1; 25.2; 27.1; 28.1;

612/II 29.3; 46.1; 46.2; 47.1; 47.5; 48.2; 49.1; 49.2; 51.2; 52.1; 53.4; 55.1; 61.1; 62.4; 64.1; 65.3; 67; 69.1; 71.2; 73.2; 73.3; 79; 88.1; 109.1; 142.3; 211.4 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor  138 Charles XII, King of Sweden  132.3 Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Queen of the United Kingdom  159.1; 159.3 Chateaubriand, François-René  35.4 Chatham, Earl of, see Pitt, William, the Elder Chatterton, Thomas  111.2; 129.2; 142.4; 149; 150.1; 151.1; 152.2; 154.3; 184.1; 214.1 Chaucer, Geoffrey  3; 40.1; 44.4; 47.2; 47.5; 51.2; 75.2; 77.3; 78.1; 106.4; 121.4; 121.6; 123.2; 123.5; 126.2; 133.5; 149.2; 152.1; 170.1; 172.3; 172.4; 173.1; 189.1; 189.3; 196.1; 228.2 Chaworth, Mary  201.1 Chekhov, Anton  56.1 Chénier, André  178.1 Chesterfield, Lord (Philip Stanhope)  133.3; 136.3 Chesterton, Gilbert Keith  173.1; 173.4; 174.1 Churchill, Charles  115.1; 131; 135.1; 140.3 Churchill, Sarah  105.2 Churchill, Winston  71.4 Cibber, Colley  59.2; 59.4; 76.3; 78.1; 79; 121.3; 222.1 Cicero, Marcus Tullius  73.1; 74.2; 111.3; 215.3 Cicognini, Giacinto Andrea  58.1 Cimabue 173.1 Clairmont, Claire  170.1; 189.2; 190.3; 203.1 Clare, John  219; 220.1 Clarendon, 1st Earl of (Edward Hyde)  1.9; 1.10; 10.1; 64.1; 78.1 Clarke, Samuel  104 Claudian 47.5

Index of names Cleopatra  50.3; 75.3 Cleveland, Duchess of (Barbara Villiers)  55.1 Cleveland, John  24; 27.2; 48.2; 62.2 Clive, Robert  111.4 Clough, Arthur Hugh  182.3 Clytemnestra 215.3 Cobbett, William  157.1; 169; 214.1; 219.1; 230 Coiro, Ann Baynes  11.1; 11.2; 11.3 Coleridge, Hartley  183.4 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor  12.1; 16.2; 25.5; 29.3; 31.4; 40.1; 42.2; 47.6; 48.1; 73.1; 73.4; 99; 100.3; 116.3; 123.1; 129.3; 132.4; 144.1; 145.1; 145.4; 148.2; 149.2; 152.3; 157.1; 158.2; 158.3; 158.4; 158.5; 167; 168.3; 170.1; 173.1; 176.2; 178.2; 178.4; 180.1; 181.1; 181.3; 182.2; 182.3; 183–8; 189.1; 189.2; 190.1; 190.2; 190.3; 192.1; 193.1; 194.1; 194.2; 195.1; 195.3; 196.5; 198.1; 199.1; 200.4; 201.2; 206.1; 207; 211.4; 214.1; 214.2; 214.4; 215.1; 216.2; 220.1; 223.2; 224.1; 224.2; 224.3; 224.4; 225.1; 226.2; 228.1; 228.3; 228.4; 229.2; 231.2 Colles, Ramsay  220.2 Collett, Mary  17.3 Collier, Jeremy  46.1; 56.2; 56.5; 59.1; 61.3; 73.3; 73.4; 97.1; 162.2 Collins, Anthony  104; 110.2; 110.5 Collins, Wilkie  25.1; 142.1; 159.2; 159.3; 168.2 Collins, William  130; 222.1; 229.4 Colman, George  98.2; 140.3 Colman, George, the Younger  231.1 Columbus, Christopher  138; 214.3; 217 Colvin, Christina  166.1 Congreve, William  46.1; 46.2; 56; 57.1; 57.3; 59.1; 59.3; 60.1; 60.2; 69.1; 96.3; 114.1; 115.3; 121.1; 140.3

613/II

Index of names Conrad, Joseph  155.2; 168.5; 214.2; 225.2 Constable, John  158.7 Constantine, Roman Emperor  52.1 Copernicus, Nicolaus  41.2 Corbett, Richard  22 Cornaro, Luigi  14 Corneille, Pierre  40.2; 73.5; 97.2 Corns, Thomas N.  35.2 Corot, Jean-Baptiste Camille  130.2 Cortés, Hernán  50.2 Corti, Claudia  173.1; 174.1 Cotton, Charles  44.4; 62.3 Courtenay, William  144.1 Coverdale, Miles  30.1 Coward, Noel  46.1 Cowley, Abraham  1.7; 2.1; 16.2; 23; 25.4; 26.1; 28.1; 35.1; 40.2; 41.2; 46.2; 48.2; 63.2; 133.5 Cowper, William  12.1; 32.3; 77.2; 109.3; 111.2; 150; 151.1; 151.2; 152.1; 152.2; 161.2; 174.1; 214.1 Crabbe, George  110.4; 152; 154.2; 158.6; 181.1; 201.2; 216.2; 223.3 Cradock, Charlotte  124.3 Crashaw, Richard  2.4; 2.6; 9.1; 9.2; 12.1; 16–17; 18.1; 19.2; 21; 23.2; 23.3; 24; 25.3; 26.1; 29.2; 32.3; 40.1; 44.2; 47.3; 53.3; 74.1; 97.1; 109.4; 133.5; 145.3; 189.4 Crisafulli, Lilla Maria  158.6 Crisp, Samuel  159.2 Croce, Benedetto  206.1 Croft, Herbert  109.3 Cromwell, Oliver  1.6; 1.7; 1.8; 11.1; 23.2; 23.3; 24; 25.2; 25.3; 25.4; 25.5; 25.6; 26.3; 27.1; 27.3; 34.1; 34.2; 35.4; 36.1; 47.1; 48.2; 54.2; 62.1; 64.1; 64.2; 66.2; 68.3; 70.1; 126.2; 211.6 Cromwell, Richard  1.8; 25.4; 35.5 Cudworth, Ralph  2.7 Cumberland, Richard  140.3; 231.1

Cupid  17.3; 17.4; 17.5; 21; 77.3 Curtius, Ernst Robert  106.3; 112.1 Cuvier, Georges  204.4 Cuzzoni, Francesca  78.4 D’Annunzio, Gabriele  43.1; 189.4; 200.3 D’Arblay, Alexander  159.1 D’Elia, Gaetano  44.4; 105.2; 192.2; 212.4 D’Urfey, Thomas  148.1 Da Ponte, Lorenzo  49.3 Dacier, Anne  75.5 Daiches, David  36.1; 36.2; 110.5; 113.1; 147.2; 154.1; 154.2 Dallas, Robert Charles  202.1 Dalton, John  212.1 Danby, Lord (Thomas Osborne)  1.9 Danielson, Dennis Richard  31.4; 35.2; 36.7 Darius III, King of Persia  51.5 Darley, George  220.2; 223.1 Darwin, Charles  136.4 Darwin, Erasmus  212.2 Davenant, Sir William  46.1; 46.2; 47.6; 50.1; 50.3; 68.1 David  23.3; 51.2 David, Jacques-Louis  106.2 Davidson, John  106.1 Davy, Humphry  212.1 Davys, Mary  71.5 Day-Lewis, Cecil  219.1 De la Bédoyère, Guy  66.1 De Beer, Esmond Samuel  66.1 De Bosis, Adolfo  189.4 De Crousaz, Jean-Pierre  76.1 De Filippo, Eduardo  115.1 De Man, Paul  158.6 De Mourgues, Odette  2.2 De Quincey, Thomas  152.3; 178.4; 214.4; 215.1; 215.3; 225; 226.1; 226.2 De Vigny, Alfred Victor  149.2 Deane, Seamus  60.1; 113.1; 166.1; 166.2; 218.1; 220.2

614/II Debussy, Claude  26.4 Dee, John  2.6 Defoe, Daniel  15.1; 35.1; 71.2; 71.3; 73.1; 73.2; 73.3; 73.4; 73.5; 82–8; 89.5; 92.1; 92.2; 92.3; 96.3; 97.1; 98.2; 100.1; 116.2; 117.1; 118.2; 119.1; 122; 125.2; 125.3; 135.1; 146.1; 150.1; 167; 205.5 Dekker, Thomas  54.2; 85.1 Delacroix, Eugène  200.2; 203.2 Delilah 39 Della Casa, Giovanni  34.1 Deloney, Thomas  44.1; 73.5; 82.2 Democritus  42.1; 42.3; 44.3; 132.3 Demosthenes 111.3 Denbigh, Countess of (Susan Fielding)  17.3 Denham, Sir John  2.1; 4.2; 8.2; 28; 48.1; 75.2 Dennis, John  73.4; 76.3; 78.1; 78.4; 79; 97.4 Derrida, Jacques  25.1; 158.6 Descartes, René  68.2; 68.4; 77.1; 137.1; 137.2 Devereux, Robert, Earl of Essex  1.3; 41.2 Devlin, Christopher  151.2 Diana  196.3; 196.5 Dickens, Charles  2.3; 31.4; 56.3; 56.4; 59.1; 65.3; 66.3; 82.2; 85.1; 87; 92.1; 96.3; 98.2; 111.4; 113.1; 115.2; 123.6; 125.1; 125.2; 136.3; 141.2; 141.5; 152.1; 155.2; 156; 159.2; 160.2; 162.1; 162.2; 164; 166.3; 170.3; 172.2; 172.4; 206.1; 206.2; 208.2; 208.3; 212.2; 215.2; 222.4; 223.1; 224.1; 228.1; 229.1; 229.2 Dickinson, Emily  11.2; 12.2 Diderot, Denis  73.4; 116.2; 145.1 Digby, Kenelm  43.2 Diodati, Charles  34.1; 66.3; 129.2 Diodati, Giovanni  34.1 Diodati, Theodore  34.1; 66.3 Diogenes 215.3 Disraeli, Benjamin  166.3 Dix, Robin  110.2

Index of names Dobell, Bertram  19.1; 220.2 Dobrée, Bonamy  53.1; 74.1; 96.1 Dobson, Austin  66.1; 113.1 Dodsley, James  110.2; 129.4; 130.1; 149.1; 149.2 Dolben, Digby  129.2 Don Juan  49.3; 54.4; 57.1; 58.1; 58.2; 58.3; 58.4; 60.4; 119.3; 134.2; 204.1; 205.2; 205.3; 205.4 Donizetti, Gaetano  158.7; 206.1; 209.3 Donne, John  2.2; 2.4; 2.6; 2.7; 3; 6.2; 7.2; 8.2; 9.2; 10.2; 10.3; 10.4; 11.2; 12.1; 12.3; 15.2; 16.1; 18.3; 21; 22; 23.1; 23.3; 24; 26.1; 26.5; 29.1; 29.2; 29.3; 31.4; 40.1; 42.1; 43.1; 44.4; 51.4; 62.1; 65.3; 76.2; 77.3; 97.2; 107.3; 109.4; 110.5; 127.4; 129.5; 129.6; 146.1; 178.3; 188.1; 193.2; 201.2; 228.4 Donner, Wolfgang Henry  220.1 Donoghue, Denis  89.2 Dorimon (Nicolas Drouin)  58.1 Dorset, Earl of see Sackville, Charles Dostoevsky, Fyodor  170.2; 179 Douglas, Gavin  154.1 Doyle, Arthur Conan  224.1 Draghi, Giovanni Battista  51.5 Draper, Eliza  128.1 Drayton, Michael  6.1; 7.1; 108.2; 196.4 Drogheda, Countess of (Letitia Isabella Robartes) 55.1 Drummond, William of Hawthornden  3; 6; 7.1; 8.1; 44.1; 130.3 Dryden, John  1.9; 2.7; 25.3; 27.2; 31.4; 35.2; 35.4; 35.7; 45.1; 45.2; 46.1; 46.2; 47–51; 52.1; 52.2; 53.1; 53.2; 53.3; 53.4; 54.1; 54.3; 55.2; 55.3; 56.2; 56.3; 56.5; 57.1; 61.1; 61.3; 63.1; 67; 68.4; 71.2; 73.5; 73.7; 74.1; 74.2; 74.4; 75.2; 75.5; 76.3; 77.1; 77.3; 79; 86; 89.3; 89.5; 90.1; 95.1; 96.2; 99; 114.1; 119.3; 130.2; 132.3; 133.5; 140.2; 201.2; 204.5; 207; 211.4; 228.4

Index of names Du Bartas, Guillaume de Saluste  7.1; 35.3; 44.4 Duck, Stephen  73.3 Dunbar, William  6.1; 154.1 Dunlap, Rhodes  10.1; 10.3 Durr, R. A.  18.2 Dyce, Alexander  217 Dyer, John  108; 112.4; 173.1; 224.2 Eaves, Morris  173.3; 174.1; 174.1; 174.3; 177.1 Eberle-Sinatra, Michael  228.2 Edgeworth, Maria  71.3; 156; 166; 220.1; 222.1 Edleston, John  201.1 Edward I, King of England  129.7 Edward III, King of England  175.1 Edward IV, King of England  211.5 Ehrenpreis, Irvin  89.3 Elgin, Lord (Thomas Bruce)  196.1; 202.2 Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans)  14; 31.2; 34.1; 70.1; 109.2; 109.5; 110.4; 116.3; 139.1; 143.3; 150.4; 152.1; 155.2; 160.1; 162.2; 167; 189.4; 194.2; 206.2; 209.2; 209.4 Eliot, Thomas Stearns  2.2; 12.1; 12.2; 12.3; 13.1; 16.1; 16.2; 18.3; 23.1; 23.2; 25.5; 26.1; 29.2; 31.4; 35.3; 43.1; 47.1; 47.7; 73.7; 101.3; 127.2; 131.1; 150.2; 172.4; 173.4; 177.1; 178.3; 188.3; 189.4; 193.1; 194.2; 199.3; 200.3; 205.2; 215.2; 220.2; 225.2; 230.2 Elizabeth Stuart, Electress Palatine and Queen of Bohemia  1.4; 4.1; 21 Elizabeth I Tudor, Queen of England  1.5; 1.8; 7.1; 41.1; 41.2; 52.1; 63.2; 71.2; 72.3; 109.1; 145.2; 211.2; 230.2 Ellis, Frank H.  61.1 Elyot, Sir Thomas  34.2; 57.3 Emerson, Ralph Waldo  43.1; 160.4; 214.1; 215.2 Emmet, Robert  218.1

615/II Empson, William  12.2; 25.1; 35.7; 48.2; 121.1; 123.3; 129.6; 178.3; 185.1; 188.4 Epicurus  67; 110.4; 215.3 Equiano, Olaudah  157.1 Essex, Countess of (Frances Howard)  1.3 Etherege, Sir George  51.3; 53.3; 54; 55.1; 55.2; 55.3; 56.1; 57.3; 59.2; 59.3; 61.1; 69.1 Euclid 68.3 Euripides 130.3 Eve  13.1; 26.3; 26.6; 35.6; 35.7; 36.2; 37.1; 37.2; 37.3; 38.1; 39; 159.1; 173.2; 174.3; 204.4 Evelyn, John  2.7; 23.1; 29.2; 65.1; 66; 67; 73.5; 202.1 Fairfax, Edward  27.2 Fairfax, Thomas  1.6; 1.7; 25.3; 25.5; 27.2 Falkland, 2nd Viscount of (Lucius Cary) 8.3 Farquhar, George  46.2; 60; 97.2; 113.1; 114.1; 115.3 Fassò, Luigi  206.1 Fausset I’Anson, Hugh  108.1 Faust  82.1; 144.3; 174.4; 185.3; 189.3; 204.1; 204.4 Ferdinand VII, King of Spain  215.1 Fergusson, Robert  154.3 Ferrar, Nicholas  12.2; 12.3; 13.1; 16.3; 17.3; 29.1 Ferrier, Susan  168.1 Field, John  158.7 Fielding, Henry  46.1; 59.1; 71.4; 73.3; 76.3; 96.3; 109.3; 113.1; 116.2; 117.1; 119.1; 121–4; 125.1; 125.2; 125.3; 127.1; 140.1; 140.3; 141.4; 159.2; 161.1; 162.1; 162.2; 180.2; 208.2 Filmer, Sir Robert  1.1; 68.3; 73.4 Fink, Guido  116.2; 121.1 Firbank, Ronald  144.1; 229.1 Fish, Stanley  12.3; 31.4 Fitzgerald, Lord Edward  152.2; 218.1 Flatman, Thomas  51.2

616/II Flaubert, Gustave  42.1; 56.1; 89.2 Flaxman, John  73.6; 173.1; 174.1; 175.1; 217 Flecknoe, Richard  25.3; 51.2; 51.3; 76.3 Fletcher, Giles  3; 7 Fletcher, Giles, the Elder  7.1; 35.1 Fletcher, John  3; 7; 46.1; 47.5; 61.1; 62.3; 196.4; 214.2; 220.2; 224.1 Fletcher, Phineas  7.1; 7.2 Florio, John  34.1 Fogle, French R.  6.1 Foote, Samuel  140.1 Ford, Boris  2.2; 61.1; 160.5; 219.1 Ford, John  17.2; 42.1; 51.2; 53.1; 143.1; 224.1 Forster, Edward Morgan  34.2; 152.2; 152.3; 160.5; 164; 189.4; 206.1; 208.4 Forster, John  113.1; 222.4 Foscolo, Ugo  128.2; 147.2; 189.2 Foster, James  104 Foucault, Michel  73.7; 119.2; 160.4; 170.2 Fowler, Alastair  31.4 Fowler, Edward  69.1 Fowles, John  155.3; 159.3 Fox, Charles James  157.1; 217 Fox, George  69.1 Foxe, John  69.1 Fragonard, Jean-Honoré  77.2 Francesco I de’ Medici  142.3 Franklin, Benjamin  169 Franklin, Caroline  200.3 Fraser, George Sutherland  74.3; 75.1 Frassica, Nino  141.3 Frederick, Prince of Wales  107.2 Frederick II Hohenzollern, the Great, King of Prussia  193.2; 216.1 Frederick V, Elector Palatine  1.4 Frere, John Hookham  205.2 Freud, Sigmund  89.1; 127.2; 160.3; 160.4; 186.2; 225.3 Fricker, Sarah  184.1; 184.3 Frith, Mary  85.1 Froude, James Anthony  168.2; 169

Index of names Fruman, Norman  183.1 Frye, Northrop  42.1; 158.6; 173.4; 174.1 Fuller, Thomas  44.1; 44.3; 73.5 Furbank, Philip Nicholas  82.2 Fuseli, Henry  31.4; 146.1; 158.7; 171.1; 174.1; 217 Gainsborough, Thomas  73.6; 112.3; 140.1; 157.1 Galilei, Galileo  2.7; 34.1; 36.1; 68.2; 104 Galletti, Alfredo  189.4 Galsworthy, John  167 Galt, John  154.2; 166.1; 166.2; 167; 206.1; 218.2 Galvani, Luigi  212.2 Gamba, Pietro  205.1 Gamba, Ruggero  205.1 Garibaldi, Giuseppe  215.3 Garner, Ross  18.2 Garnett (or Garnet), Henry  63.2 Garnier, Robert  3 Garrick, David  59.3; 113.2; 113.3; 115.2; 131.2; 132.2; 132.3; 133.2; 140.1; 140.3; 141.2; 159.2 Garth, Samuel  75.3 Gaskell, Elizabeth  152.1; 159.1; 160.1; 162.2; 162.3; 164; 183.3; 223.1 Gaskill, Howard  147.2 Gassendi, Pierre  68.2 Gauden, John, Archbishop  1.4 Gay, John  57.1; 73.2; 73.3; 76.3; 78; 79; 81.1; 105.2; 106.2; 122; 140.1 Gelli, Giovan Battista  93.5 Genette, Gérard  172.1 Gentili, Vanna  42.1 George I Hanover, King of Great Britain  72.4; 81.1; 93.2; 95.1; 109.1; 132.2; 136.3 George II Augustus Hanover, King of Great Britain  72.4; 73.1; 76.3; 109.1; 111.2; 136.3; 142.1

Index of names George III Hanover, King of Great Britain  111.3; 142.1; 146.4; 157.1; 176.2; 189.1; 204.5 George IV Hanover, King of Great Britain  157.1; 160.2; 192.2; 218.1; 228.1 Ghosh, J. C.  53.1 Gibbon, Edward  103; 106.3; 132.3; 138; 139; 176.1; 203.3; 214.3; 231.2 Gibbons, Grinling  66.2; 73.6 Gibbs, James  73.6 Gibbs, Lewis  159.1 Gielgud, John  141.2 Gifford, John, of Bedford  70.1 Gifford, William  201.2; 226.1 Gilbert, Sandra M.  160.1; 160.5; 166.2 Gilbert, William Schwenck 204.4; 218.1 Gilchrist, Alexander  173.1; 173.4 Gilfillan, George  62.3 Gill, Stephen  178.3 Gillham, D. G.  173.4 Gilpin, William  158.7 Gioberti, Vincenzo  200.3 Giotto 173.1 Gissing, George  201.2 Glanville, Joseph  2.7; 68.3 Gluck, Christoph Willibald  205.2 Godolphin, Francis  40.1 Godolphin, Sidney  40.1; 66.1 Godwin, William  112.2; 145.1; 166.1; 168.2; 168.4; 170; 171.1; 171.2; 174.2; 178.2; 179; 180.1; 189.3; 189.4; 190.1; 191.3; 196.1; 212.1; 224.1; 229.2; 231.1 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang  25.4; 41.1; 116.1; 116.2; 145.4; 147.2; 158.2; 177.1; 189.4; 192.1; 200.3; 204.1; 204.4; 207; 211.4; 211.5; 212.3; 213.1; 225.2; 229.2 Goldberg, Jonathan  35.1 Golding, William  205.5 Goldoni, Carlo  56.1; 116.2

617/II Goldsmith, Oliver  14; 73.1; 110.4; 113–15; 117.1; 119.1; 127.1; 133.2; 140.1; 146.3; 152.3; 156; 167; 179; 202.1; 219.1; 229.4 Goldstein, Laurence  108.1 Goncharov, Ivan  42.1 Gondomar, Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, Count of  1.3 Góngora, Luis de  16.1 Goodwin, Gordon  5.1 Gordon, I. R. F.  74.2 Gordon, Lord George  111.4 Gordon of Gight, Catherine  201.1 Gosse, Edmund  54.1; 105.1 Gower, John  42.3; 109.4 Goya, Francisco  112.3 Gozzi, Carlo  98.1 Gracián, Baltasar  2.6 Grafton, Duke of (Augustus Henry Fitzroy) 135.2 Graham, James, Marquis of Montrose  9.1 Graves, Robert  31.4; 42.1 Gray, Thomas  32.4; 73.3; 105.1; 110.5; 112.4; 113.5; 129; 130.1; 130.3; 142.1; 146.1; 149.1; 158.2; 161.1; 173.1; 190.1; 219.1; 229.4 Greco, El (Doménikos Theotokópoulos)  16.1 Green, Matthew  110.4 Greenacre, Phyllis  89.3 Greene, Graham  168.2; 170.2; 209.1; 224.1 Greene, Robert  73.5; 132.3; 133.3 Gregori, Flavio  74.1; 78.1 Grey, Lady Jane  109.1 Grierson, Herbert John Clifford  4.2; 10.1; 35.2; 38.2; 146.3; 152.3; 154.1; 155.1 Griffin, Dustin  31.4 Grimaldi, Joseph  205.2 Grosart, Alexander Balloch  19.1 Grotius, Hugo  15.1; 104 Grundy, Isobel  136.1

618/II Grundy, Joan  7.1 Guarini, Giovanni Battista  6.2 Gubar, Susan  160.1; 160.5; 166.2 Guerard, Albert  158.6 Guiccioli, Alessandro  205.1 Guiccioli, Teresa  205.1; 205.5 Guilbert de Pixérécourt  231.1 Gustav II Adolf of Sweden, the Great  8.1; 82.1 Gwynn, Nell  46.1; 49.1; 49.2 Habington, William  40.1 Hakluyt, Richard  7.1 Hales, John  8.3; 10.1 Hall, Joseph, Archbishop  29.1; 34.2 Hall-Stevenson, John  128.4 Ham, Roswell  52.2 Handel, George Frideric  35.1; 45.2; 56.2; 73.6; 78.1; 78.2; 78.4; 157.1 Hanmer, Thomas  130.2 Hannay, James  131.1 Hannibal  52.1; 215.3 Hardy, Thomas  59.3; 124.1; 152.1; 166.3; 189.4; 206.1 Harley, Robert  72.2; 72.4; 77.1; 81.1; 82.1 Harrington, James  68.3 Harris, Jocelyn  120.1; 120.3 Harrison, Frank Mott  70.1 Hartley, David  104; 178.3; 179; 188.3 Hartman, Geoffrey H.  158.6; 178.3 Harvey, William  41.2; 129.2 Hastings, Lord (Henry)  48.2 Hastings, Warren  146.4 Hauser, Arnold  2.5 Hawes, Stephen  69.2 Hawkes, David  32.2 Hawkins, John  132.2 Hawthorne, Nathaniel  170.2 Haydn, Franz Joseph  35.1; 106.2 Haydon, Benjamin Robert  195.2; 196.2 Hayley, William  173.1; 174.1

Index of names Haywood, Eliza  71.4; 71.5 Hazard, Paul  112.1 Hazlitt, William  53.2; 133.2; 145.4; 158.3; 158.6; 170.1; 183.4; 189.4; 196.1; 214.4; 215.2; 217; 218.1; 226; 228.3; 231.2 Hecht, Anthony  12.2 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich  137.1; 161.2; 206.4 Heine, Heinrich  229.1 Heliodorus 121.2 Hemans, Felicia  222 Hemingway, Ernest  85.1 Hemlow, Joyce  159.1 Henley, Samuel  144.2 Henrietta Maria of Bourbon, Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland  1.4; 1.7; 8.1; 10.2; 17.3; 54.2; 211.4 Henry II, King of England  211.6 Henry III, King of England  179 Henry IV, King of England  145.2; 210.2 Henry VII, King of England  41.1 Henry VIII, King of England  1.5; 1.6; 12.2; 15.1; 64.1; 132.3; 137.2; 142.4; 230.2 Henry Frederick Stuart, Prince of Wales  3; 4.1; 6.1 Henryson, Robert  154.1 Heraclitus  44.3; 109.4 Herbert, George  2.4; 2.6; 6.2; 10.1; 12–14; 15.1; 16.1; 16.3; 17.2; 17.3; 18.1; 18.2; 19.2; 21; 26.4; 29.1; 40.1; 44.4; 65.3; 150.3; 150.4; 221; 227 Herbert of Cherbury  2.7; 10.1; 12.1; 15; 26.5; 64.1 Hercules 62.3 Herd, David  154.3 Hermes Trismegistus  20 Herodotus  194.2; 229.4 Herrick, Robert  2.2; 9.2; 10.1; 11; 15.1; 15.2; 17.3; 26.1; 215.2 Hervey, Lord ( John Hervey)  142.2

619/II

Index of names Hervey, William  23.3 Heywood, John  46.1; 49.1; 54.2; 97.3; 140.2 Higgins, James Craig  172.2 Hill, Aaron  78.1 Hill, Abigail (Lady Masham)  72.3 Hill, Christopher  35.6; 69.1; 116.3 Hill, John Spencer  184.3 Hitchener, Elizabeth  190.1 Hitchin, Charles  78.5 Hoadley, Benjamin, Archbishop  103 Hobbes, Thomas  1.1; 2.7; 23.2; 23.3; 26.3; 40.1; 45.1; 61.2; 68.1–3; 68.4; 73.4; 78.5; 99; 102; 104; 146.3; 226.2 Hobhouse, John  202.1 Hobsbawm, Eric  157.3 Hoccleve, Thomas  5.1 Hocke, Gustav René  2.6 Hoffmann, E. T. A.  155.2 Hogarth, William  54.4; 73.6; 123.1; 123.7; 125.2; 126.3; 131.2; 135.1; 223.1; 223.3 Hogg, James  155; 156; 167; 170.2; 172.2; 172.4; 207; 219.1; 225.3 Hogg, Thomas Jefferson  189.1; 189.3; 190.1; 191.3 Holcroft, Thomas  231.1 Hölderlin, Friedrich  189.2 Holmes, Elizabeth  18.2 Home, John  140.3; 147.1 Homer  35.3; 47.3; 47.5; 62.1; 68.1; 73.5; 74.3; 75.3; 75.5; 77.1; 83.1; 96.3; 121.2; 123.2; 147.1; 158.2; 174.1; 177.1; 182.4; 194.2; 195.1; 205.3; 206.2; 214.3; 228.4; 229.4 Hood, Thomas  214.4; 223.1; 223.2; 223.3 Hooker, Richard  12.3; 44.1; 44.4 Hopkins, Gerard Manley  2.6; 8.2; 11.3; 11.4; 12.1; 12.3; 16.2; 17.3; 17.5; 18.1; 19.2; 19.3; 20; 22; 26.6; 31.4; 35.2; 47.6; 65.2; 74.2; 75.2; 100.4; 105.1; 106.5; 109.2; 109.4; 112.3; 113.5; 127.2; 129.2; 129.5; 130.2; 136.4;

145.3; 147.1; 150.2; 150.3; 150.4; 151.2; 155.1; 158.7; 173.1; 173.3; 176.1; 181.1; 181.3; 185.1; 192.2; 195.2; 195.3; 195.4; 196.4; 199.5; 206.3; 216.2; 219.1; 221; 226.2; 228.4; 230.2 Hopton, Susanna  19.2; 20 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus)  11.3; 25.5; 26.1; 27.2; 48.1; 63.1; 73.1; 73.5; 76.2; 77.1; 133.4; 150.4; 192.1 Hoskins, John  40.1 Houghton, John  1.8 Housman, Alfred Edward  55.1; 215.2 Howard, Sir Robert  50.2 Hughes, John  75.4 Hughes, Ted  26.2; 32.5 Hugo, Herman  21 Hugo, Victor  158.2 Hume, David  73.4; 100.3; 112.2; 137; 138; 139.1; 154.1; 175.1 Hunt, John  228.1 Hunt, Leigh  73.2; 158.4; 170.1; 191.3; 192.2; 195.1; 195.2; 195.4; 196.1; 196.2; 196.3; 196.4; 198.1; 205.1; 215.1; 218.1; 223.2; 228 Hunt, William Holman  119.1 Hurd, Richard  142.2 Hutcheson, Francis  102; 104 Hutchinson, John  45.2 Hutchinson, Mary  182.2 Hutchinson, Sara  186.3; 188.1 Hutchinson, Thomas  189.1 Huxley, Aldous  12.2; 55.4; 61.1; 173.4; 229.1 Huysmans, Joris-Karl  6.1; 75.1 Imlay, Fanny  171.1; 190.3 Imlay, Gilbert  171.1; 171.2 Inchbald, Elizabeth  168.2 Innocent XI, Pope  1.10 Innocenti, Loretta  2.4 Ionesco, Eugène  229.2 Ireton, Henry  1.8

620/II Irving, Washington  113.2 Iser, Wolfgang  110.5 Isolde  37.2; 127.7 Izzo, Carlo  32.3; 32.4; 149.1 Jack, Ian  189.4; 195.2; 215.1; 219.1; 225.2; 230.2 James, Henry  19.2; 89.2; 116.3; 119.1; 160.5; 200.1 James I Stuart, King of England and Scotland  1.3; 1.5; 2.1; 3; 5.1; 6.2; 6.3; 7.1; 10.1; 13.1; 15.1; 30.1; 41.2; 42.1; 47.3; 72.4; 125.2; 133.3; 137.2; 172.2; 211.4 James II Stuart, King of England, Scotland and Ireland  1.4; 1.8; 1.10; 1.11; 51.2; 54.2; 55.1; 64.1; 71.5; 72.3; 99; 105.2 James III Stuart, the Old Pretender  1.4; 1.11 James V, King of Scotland  207 Jeffares, A. N.  89.3; 92.1 Jeffrey, Francis (Lord Jeffrey)  89.1; 154.3; 158.5; 216.1; 218.1; 227 Jerome, Jerome K.  44.4 Jesus Christ  2.4; 12.1; 12.2; 12.3; 17.2; 17.4; 17.5; 18.3; 25.4; 26.3; 26.4; 32.1; 32.3; 35.1; 35.6; 36.2; 38.1; 38.2; 38.3; 39; 43.3; 43.4; 51.3; 69.3; 70.1; 83.3; 83.4; 109.4; 117.4; 120.3; 123.3; 123.4; 133.2; 134.1; 141.4; 173.2; 173.3; 174.3; 174.4; 175.2; 175.3; 176.3; 177.1; 177.2; 183.3; 185.2; 185.3; 191.4; 194.2; 195.3; 196.3; 198.2; 204.4; 224.3 Joan of Arc  214.2 Joanna I, Queen of Naples  215.3 Job  108.2; 174.1; 191.3 John Lackland  28.2; 210.1 Johnson, Charles  140.2 Johnson, Esther (Stella)  67; 94.1; 95.2; 128.1 Johnson, James  172.2 Johnson, Joseph  176.2

Index of names Johnson, Samuel  17.3; 23.1; 23.3; 27.2; 28.2; 31.4; 32.2; 39; 42.2; 43.1; 47.7; 56.5; 62.3; 67; 71.2; 71.3; 71.4; 72.3; 73.1; 73.3; 73.5; 74.1; 74.2; 75.1; 75.5; 76.2; 76.3; 77.1; 77.2; 79; 89.3; 92.4; 96.1; 100.3; 100.4; 102; 103; 106.1; 106.2; 106.5; 107.2; 108.1; 109.2; 109.3; 109.5; 110.2; 110.4; 112.3; 113.1; 113.2; 114.1; 121.2; 124.1; 129.3; 129.5; 130.1; 130.3; 131.1; 132–3; 134.1; 134.2; 135.1; 136.3; 139.1; 140.1; 143.4; 144.1; 147.1; 148.1; 151.1; 151.2; 152.1; 152.3; 159.2; 179; 188.4; 208.1; 230.2 Johnston, Kenneth R.  178.1 Jonah 123.4 Jones, Edmund David  228.3 Jones, Inigo  10.2 Jonson, Ben  2.2; 3; 4.2; 5.1; 6.1; 8.2; 10.1; 10.2; 10.3; 11.1; 15.2; 22; 24; 26.1; 35.7; 40.1; 42.1; 44.1; 44.2; 44.3; 46.1; 47.2; 47.5; 49.2; 50.3; 51.3; 54.1; 54.2; 55.3; 56.1; 56.5; 57.1; 59.2; 59.3; 60.4; 74.1; 74.2; 80; 200.4; 208.4; 215.2; 228.4 Josiah 170.1 Joubert, Joseph  183.4 Jove  49.3; 102; 191.3; 191.4 Joyce, James  2.6; 7.2; 11.2; 19.2; 31.3; 35.1; 42.1; 42.3; 51.2; 62.2; 62.3; 65.3; 65.4; 69.2; 74.3; 74.4; 75.3; 76.3; 78.3; 82.1; 85.1; 86; 90.1; 92.4; 94.1; 113.1; 121.1; 123.2; 123.3; 125.1; 125.2; 126.2; 127.2; 127.4; 127.5; 127.6; 135.2; 136.2; 141.3; 147.2; 149.1; 174.1; 176.3; 177.1; 182.4; 186.1; 186.2; 192.1; 192.4; 194.1; 205.1; 205.2; 206.1; 206.3; 209.2; 209.5; 218.1; 224.2; 229.1 Joyce, Nora  174.1 Julian, Count of Ceuta  215.1 Julian of Norwich  20

Index of names Jung, Carl  186.2 Junius  135.2; 204.5 Juvenal (Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis)  48.1; 63.1; 121.2; 132.3 Kafka, Franz  145.4; 170.2; 209.4; 225.2 Kant, Immanuel  41.1; 68.4; 100.3; 137.1; 158.3; 183.1; 183.2; 185.1; 193.2 Karpman, Ben  89.1 Kean, Edmund  231.2 Keats, John  5.1; 5.2; 16.2; 26.4; 42.2; 99; 105.1; 105.2; 106.4; 110.2; 130.3; 145.1; 149.2; 158.2; 158.3; 158.4; 160.3; 173.3; 178.3; 183.3; 188.3; 189.1; 191.3; 192.4; 193.1; 193.2; 194.2; 195–9; 200.4; 201.2; 202.2; 203.3; 215.2; 219.1; 220.1; 220.2; 223.1; 223.2; 223.3; 224.4; 228.1; 228.2; 231.2 Keats, Tom  198.2 Keble, John  12.2; 150.2; 221; 230.2 Kelly, Hugh  140.3 Kemble, John Philip  141.2; 168.2; 231.2 Kemble, Sarah see Siddons, Sarah Kemeny, Tomaso  200.2 Kenny, Shirley Strum  60.2; 97.2 Kepler, Johannes  41.2 Kermode, Frank  18.2; 31.4 Kerrigan, William  32.2 Kiefer Lewalski, Barbara  2.4; 12.3; 32.2; 35.7; 38.1 Killigrew, Anne  51.5; 105.2 Killigrew, Thomas  46.1 King, Edward  24; 27.2; 32.5; 34.1; 48.2 King, Gregory  1.2 King, Henry  2.2; 22 King, William, Archbishop  89.1 Kingsley, Charles  14; 139.2; 211.8 Kipling, Rudyard  160.5; 211.7 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb  35.1 Kneller, Sir Godfrey  45.2; 73.6

621/II Knowles, James Sheridan  231.2 Koestler, Arthur  145.4 Kotzebue, August von  162.2; 168.2; 231.1 Kurosawa, Akira  155.3 Kyd, Thomas  56.4; 143.1; 145.1 Kynaston, Sir Francis  40.1 La Bruyère, Jean de  73.5 La Fontaine, Jean de  105.2 La Motte, Antoine Houdar  75.5; 220.1 Lacan, Jacques  158.6; 185.3 Lafayette, Madame de  52.1 Lafayette, Marquis of (Gilbert du Motier)  159.1 Lamb, Charles  4.2; 21; 40.2; 42.2; 43.1; 44.1; 56.1; 158.3; 158.4; 158.5; 158.6; 170.1; 178.4; 184.1; 185.3; 189.4; 196.1; 214.4; 215.3; 220.1; 223.1; 224; 225.1; 225.3; 225.4; 226.1; 226.2; 228.1 Lamb, Lady Caroline  203.1 Landon, Letitia Elizabeth  222 Landor, Robert Eyres  215.1 Landor, Walter Savage  214.1; 215; 218.2; 222.3; 229.1 Langland, William  7.2; 18.3; 21; 46.1; 69.2; 69.3; 162.1; 193.1 Larbaud, Valery  215.2 Lascelles, Nancy  125.2 Lauber, John  206.1; 206.2; 209.1 Laud, William (Archbishop of Canterbury)  1.5; 1.8; 16.3; 29.1; 29.3; 32.2; 70.1 Lavater, Johann Kaspar  175.1 Law, William  102; 103; 112.2; 139.1 Lawes, Henry  10.1; 10.2; 33 Lawes, William  27.1 Lawrence, David Herbert  10.4; 61.3; 85.1; 116.3; 127.7; 160.5; 172.1; 173.1; 173.4; 192.4; 206.1 Le Fanu, Sheridan  213.1 Le Gallienne, Richard  65.2

622/II Leapor, Mary  222.1 Leavis, Frank Raymond  31.4; 73.7; 82.2; 123.1; 189.4 Lee, Harriet 145.2 Lee, Nathaniel 52; 53.1; 53.2; 56.2; 60.1 Lee, Sophia 145.2 Lee, Vernon (Violet Paget)  52.2 Legouis, Émile  226.1 Lehmann, Rosemond  159.1 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (von)  41.1; 47.3; 89.5; 104 Leigh, Augusta  200.2; 201.1; 204.1; 205.5 Leishman, James Blair  25.4; 26.1; 27.3 Lely, Sir Peter  23.1; 45.2 Lenin, Vladimir  100.3 Lennox, Charlotte 71.4 Leonardo da Vinci  173.1; 192.2 Leopardi, Giacomo  18.3; 43.4; 75.1; 109.2; 129.4; 147.2; 152.2; 158.2; 189.2; 195.3; 200.3; 219.1 Lesage, Alain-René  121.2; 126.1 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim  44.2; 73.6; 188.1; 188.2 Lewis, Matthew Gregory (‘Monk’ Lewis)  145.3; 161.1; 185.2; 198.2; 200.2; 200.4; 204.1; 205.5 Leyden, John  207 Lillo, George 140.2; 148.2 Lincoln, Andrew  173.3; 177.1 Linley, Elizabeth  140.1 Linnaeus, Carl  43.4 Linnell, John  174.1 Lippi, Filippo  215.3 Littré, Émile  133.3 Litz, A. Walton  162.2 Livy (Titus Livius)  194.2 Locke, John  2.7; 68.4; 71.3; 73.4; 77.1; 96.3; 99; 100.2; 104; 110.2; 112.2; 118.1; 118.3; 127.3; 137.2; 158.3; 173.2; 175.1; 177.4 Lockhart, John Gibson  155.2; 226.1

Index of names Lombardo, Agostino  196.4 Longinus  73.4; 76.3; 109.2; 158.3; 222 Lope de Vega, Félix  55.3 Lorrain, Claude  110.4; 196.4 Lotman, Juri  112.1; 158.1 Louis XI, King of France  211.5 Louis XIII, King of France  1.4 Louis XIV, King of France  1.9; 1.11; 140.2 Louis XVI, King of France  176.2 Love, Harold  61.1 Lovejoy, Arthur O.  158.1 Lovelace, Ada  203.1 Lovelace, Richard  2.2; 9; 10.2; 12.1; 18.2; 40.1; 119.2 Lowes, John Livingstone  183.1; 185.1; 186.2 Lucian of Samosata  121.2; 215.3; 229.1 Lucretius  35.3; 48.1; 66.2 Lucy, Sir Thomas  215.3 Ludd, Ned  157.1 Lukács, György  160.2; 206.1; 206.2; 206.4 Luther, Martin  215.3 Lyly, John  42.1; 44.1; 52.1; 196.4 Lyndsay (also Lindsay), David  154.1 Macaulay, George Campbell  2.7; 31.4; 56.1; 67; 73.7; 89.1; 96.1; 113.1; 133.4; 159.3; 166.1; 200.3; 214.1; 228.4; 229.4 MacDiarmid, Hugh  154.1; 172.2 McGann, Jerome  158.6; 200.1 Mach, Ernst  100.3 Machiavelli, Niccolò  41.2; 45.1; 63.2; 64.1; 102; 146.3 Mack, Douglas S.  155.2 MacKenzie, Donald Francis  56.1 Mackenzie, Henry 156; 172.2 Macpherson, James  126.3; 142.4; 147; 148.1; 148.2; 149.2; 154.3 Macready, William  51.2; 231.2 Magellan, Ferdinand  185.4 Malatesti, Antonio  34.1

Index of names Malcolmson, Cristina  12.3 Mallet, David  106.1 Mallock, William Hurrell  229.1 Malory, Sir Thomas  65.1 Malthus, Thomas Robert  157.1; 192.2; 214.4; 229.2 Mandeville, Bernard (de)  72.1; 88.1; 99; 100.2; 101.1; 102; 112.2; 115.1 Mangan, James Clarence  145.4 Manley, Delarivier 71.4 Mann, Thomas  167 Manning, Gillian  57.1 Manso, Giovanni Battista  34.1 Manzoni, Alessandro  23.1; 25.4; 117.1; 117.4; 119.3; 132.3; 143.4; 143.5; 145.1; 158.2; 202.2; 211.6 Marañón, Gregorio  205.3 Marcus Antonius (Mark Antony)  50.3; 141.4 Marcus Aurelius  139.2 Marenco, Franco  32.2; 42.2; 52.1; 71.4; 73.7; 74.1; 91.1; 195.2; 220.2 Margoliouth, Herschel Maurice  25.1 Marie Antoinette, Queen of France and Navarre 146.2 Marino, Giovan Battista  2.6; 6.2; 10.1; 16.1; 17.2; 24 Marius, Gaius  53.3 Marivaux, Pierre de  121.2 Marlborough, Duchess of (Sarah Jennings) 72.3 Marlborough, Duke of ( John Churchill)  1.7; 1.11; 56.2; 71.4; 72.2; 72.3; 96.2; 96.3 Marlowe, Christopher  9.2; 19.3; 35.3; 43.3; 50.3; 52.1; 53.1; 58.1; 132.3; 155.4; 197.1; 204.1; 228.2 Marprelate, Martin  34.2 Marryat, Frederick 168.5 Marschner, Heinrich  213.1 Marshall, James Peter  146.2

623/II Marston, John  1.3; 42.1; 50.3; 54.2; 115.3; 140.2; 146.1; 211.4 Martial (Marcus Valerius Martialis)  11.3; 44.2 Martin, Leonard Cyril  23.1 Martini, Simone  119.3 Martz, Louis Lohr  2.4; 12.3; 13.2; 18.1; 20 Marucci, Franco  12.2; 150.2; 188.1; 207; 221 Marvell, Andrew  1.6; 1.7; 2.2; 2.3; 23.1; 24; 25–6; 27.1; 27.2; 27.3; 31.1; 31.3; 31.4; 32.4; 33; 35.3; 40.1; 45.2; 51.3; 71.2; 139.1; 148.1 Marx, Karl  68.4; 82.2; 83.1 Mary Magdalene  16.3; 17.3; 17.4; 38.2 Mary of Modena, Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland  1.10 Mary Stuart  1.3; 138; 145.2; 155.1; 172.4; 211.2 Mary II Stuart, Queen of England  1.10; 1.11; 46.2; 61.1; 64.1; 64.2; 73.3; 77.1 Mary I Tudor, Queen of England  1.10 Masinissa, King of Numidia  52.1 Mason, William  129.2 Massinger, Philip  49.1; 50.2 Masters, Edgar Lee  152.2 Mathew, Anthony Stephen  175.1 Maturin, Charles  145.1; 145.4; 155.2 Maurice, Count of Nassau and Prince of Orange 15.1 Maurois, André  157.2 Maximinus, Roman Emperor  50.2 Mayhead, Robin  199.6 Mazzini, Giuseppe  200.3; 215.3 Mee, Jon  174.3 Melville, Andrew  12.3 Melville, Herman  43.1; 111.3 Mendelssohn, Felix  158.7; 200.2 Mercury  10.2; 49.3; 198.4; 225.3 Meredith, George  149.2; 166.4; 229.1 Mesmer, Franz  112.1 Metastasio, Pietro  50.1; 109.2

624/II Middleton, Conyers  121.3 Middleton, Thomas  1.3; 51.2; 54.2; 55.3; 59.2; 60.2; 143.1; 191.5 Milbanke, Anna Isabella (Annabella, Lady Byron)  201.1; 203.1 Mill, John Stuart  100.3; 189.4; 228.4 Miller, J. Hillis  225.1; 225.2 Milman, Henry Hart 231.2 Milton, John  1.4; 1.7; 2.1; 2.2; 2.3; 2.4; 2.7; 7.1; 12.1; 17.2; 23.1; 24; 25.3; 28.1; 29.2; 30.2; 31–9; 42.1; 43.1; 43.3; 43.4; 44.1; 45.1; 46.2; 47.2; 47.3; 48.1; 48.2; 49.2; 51.5; 60.4; 62.1; 62.3; 63.2; 65.2; 66.3; 68.1; 69.1; 69.2; 73.5; 74.1; 74.2; 75.1; 75.3; 82.1; 85.1; 96.1; 96.4; 106.2; 106.3; 107.3; 108.2; 109.4; 110.1; 110.5; 116.2; 129.1; 129.2; 129.7; 130.3; 139.1; 143.4; 145.1; 160.4; 168.3; 174.2; 176.1; 176.3; 177.1; 177.3; 181.1; 182.3; 188.1; 188.3; 189.1; 190.1; 191.3; 191.4; 196.4; 197.1; 204.4; 204.5; 212.3; 215.1; 226.2; 229.4 Minshull, Elizabeth  35.1 Mittner, Ladislao  158.1; 158.4 Mohammed II, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire 132.3 Molière ( Jean-Baptiste Poquelin)  46.1; 49.2; 49.3; 54.1; 54.2; 55.4; 55.6; 57.1; 58.1; 58.2; 76.3; 205.2; 205.4 Monmouth, 1st Duke of (James Scott)  1.10; 51.2; 52.1; 82.1 Montagu, Elizabeth  143.1 Montagu, Lady (Mary Wortley)  75.4; 136.1–2; 159.2; 189.1 Montagu, Edward Wortley  136.2 Montaigne, Michel de  34.1; 41.1; 41.3; 42.3; 44.4; 67; 73.5; 77.1; 226.1; 226.3 Montausier, Duchess of ( Julie Luciana d’Angennes) 55.1

Index of names Montesquieu, Baron of (Charles-Louis de Secondat)  113.3; 214.1 Monteverdi, Claudio  34.1 Monti, Vincenzo  74.2; 109.2; 200.3; 215.1 Moore, Edward 140.2; 140.3 Moore, George  215.2 Moore, John  200.2 Moore, Paul Elmer  224.1 Moore, Thomas  106.1; 152.2; 191.3; 218; 223.3 More, Alexander  34.2 More, Hannah  157.1; 222.1; 231.1 More, Henry  2.7; 40.1 More, Thomas  41.1; 42.3; 64.2; 100.1; 214.4; 215.1 Morgan, Lady (Sydney Owenson)  166.1; 190.3 Morley, John  146.2 Morris, Brian  24; 147.1 Morris, William  173.1; 195.4 Morrison, R.  228.2 Morton, Thomas 231.1 Moses  41.2; 123.4; 170.1 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus  58.3; 144.1; 163.1; 195.2; 205.2; 205.3; 205.4 Muddiman, Henry  73.2 Muggleton, Ludowick  174.3 Muhammad 91.1 Muir, Kenneth  34.1; 35.4 Murillo, Bartolomé Esteban Pérez  16.1 Murphy, Arthur 140.3 Murray, John  205.2; 218.1 Murry, John Middleton  105.2; 123.2; 219.1 Mussolini, Benito  200.3 Myer, Valerie Grosvenor  119.2 Napoleon III, Emperor of France  215.1 Nash, Beau (Richard)  72.1; 113.3 Nashe, Thomas  42.1; 44.1; 73.5; 82.2 Needham, Gwendolyn Bridges  116.2

Index of names Nelson, Viscount (Horatio Nelson)  157.2; 214.4 Nerval, Gérard de  189.2 Newbery, John  151.1 Newbold, Henry  216.2 Newman, John Henry, Cardinal  22; 43.1; 206.3; 214.1; 221; 228.3; 230.2 Newport, Magdalene  12.3 Newton, Isaac  2.7; 73.4; 100.3; 106.2; 107.1; 173.2; 177.4; 190.1 Newton, John  150.1; 150.2 Nicholson, Norman  86 Nicodemus, disciple of Jesus  18.3 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm  41.1; 173.4; 176.3; 190.2; 199.2; 200.1; 204.1; 215.2 Noah  10.2; 25.5 Noel, Roden  53.1 Novak, Maximilian E.  88.1 Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg)  158.2 O’Carolan, Turlough  113.1 O’Shaughnessy, David  170.1 Oates, Titus  51.2; 211.4 Ockham, William  68.4 Oedipus 213.1 Oldham, John  51.5; 63; 76.2 Oley, Barnabas  13.1 Oliphant, Margaret  110.4; 152.1; 167 Olivier, Laurence  141.2 Ollier, Charles  192.1; 195.1 Orestes 215.3 Orgel, Stephen  35.1 Orlando, Francesco  144.2 Orpheus  32.5; 78.3 Orsini, Felice  215.1 Orsini, Gian Napoleone  41.2 Orwell, George  14; 34.1; 68.3; 74.2; 89.2; 89.4; 93.5; 125.1; 145.4; 157.2; 160.2; 201.1; 205.2; 206.1; 211.7; 228.2; 228.3; 230.2

625/II Osborne, Dorothy  67; 71.1; 71.1; 89.3 Osiris 34.1 Osler, William  42.2 Ossian  147.1; 147.2; 158.2; 176.1 Otway, Thomas  52.2; 53; 59.3; 60.1; 143.1 Overbury, Sir Thomas  1.3 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso)  31.2; 31.3; 35.3; 47.6; 75.4; 95.2; 196.3; 196.4 Owen, John 44.2 Owen, Robert  157.1 Owens, W. R.  82.2 Paananen, Victor N.  176.2 Paganelli, Eloisa  116.3 Pagnini, Marcello  17.3; 177.1; 178.3; 183.1; 184.3; 186.2; 186.3; 187.1; 188.3; 189.2; 189.4; 193.1; 193.2 Paine, Thomas  146.3; 157.1; 169; 174.2; 174.4; 178.2; 230.1; 231.1 Palgrave, Francis Turner  4.2; 220.2 Pallotta, Giovanni Evangelista, Cardinal  16.3 Palmer, Mary  25.1 Paoli, Pasquale  134.2 Papetti, Viola  54.3; 78.1; 196.4 Paracelsus 212.1 Parini, Giuseppe  109.2 Parker, Samuel  25.6 Parnell, Thomas  76.3; 113.3 Partridge, John  92.3 Pascal, Blaise  2.5; 101.1 Pascoli, Giovanni  189.4 Pater, Walter  43.1; 43.2; 43.4; 112.1; 139.1; 178.3; 182.3; 183.3; 195.2; 218.2; 224.3; 225.3 Patmore, Coventry  31.4; 109.2; 109.4; 150.2; 152.1 Pattison, Mark  101.1 Paulson, Ronald  90.2; 121.1; 123.2 Peacham, Henry  21

626/II Peacock, Thomas Love  158.6; 191.3; 192.1; 194.1; 194.2; 219.1; 224.1; 228.4; 229 Peckham, Morse  158.1 Peele, George  35.1; 223.3 Pellegrini, Giuliano  10.1; 10.2 Pepusch, Johann Christoph  78.4 Pepys, Samuel  2.7; 40.2; 49.1; 49.2; 62.1; 65; 66.1; 73.5 Percy, Thomas, bishop  110.4; 133.2; 148; 154.3; 185.2; 206.3; 223.1 Perkins, David  178.1 Persius, Aulus Flaccus  48.1; 201.2 Peter I of Russia, the Great  82.1 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca)  6.2; 11.4; 109.2; 132.2; 191.2; 215.3; 222.4 Petronius Arbiter  44.2 Phaon 157.1 Philip II, King of Spain  53.3 Philips, Ambrose  76.3; 78.2; 96.3 Philips, Katherine 40.2; 44.2; 71.1 Picart, Bernard  214.3 Pico della Mirandola  20 Pietropoli, Cecilia  158.6 Pinter, Harold  132.2; 152.3 Piozzi, Gabriel  133.2 Piozzi, Hester see Thrale, Hester Pirandello, Luigi  115.1 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista  158.7; 225.2 Pitt, Diamond  111.3 Pitt, William, the Elder  72.4; 111.2; 111.3; 131.1; 135.2 Pitt, William, the Younger  157.1; 170.1; 230.1; 230.2 Pius VII, Pope  205.1 Plath, Sylvia  32.5 Plato  124.3; 181.3; 191.3; 194.2; 196.1; 215.3; 225.4; 229.1 Plautus, Titus Maccius  49.3; 50.3 Pliny, the Elder  44.4 Plotinus 158.3

Index of names Plumb, John Harold  72.1; 111.2 Plutarch  91.1; 212.3 Poe, Edgar Allan  145.4; 158.3; 170.2 Poggi, Valentina  119.1 Polidori, Gaetano  213.1 Polidori, John William  145.1; 204.1; 212.2; 213 Poliziano (Angelo Ambrogini)  132.2 Pope, Alexander  4.2; 8.2; 23.1; 27.2; 28.2; 48.1; 55.1; 55.2; 56.2; 63.1; 71.3; 71.4; 73.1; 73.2; 73.3; 73.7; 74–6; 77.1; 77.2; 77.3; 78.1; 78.2; 78.3; 79; 80; 81.1; 81.2; 82.1; 89.4; 90.1; 91.1; 92.2; 93.1; 95.1; 96.3; 100.4; 105.1; 105.2; 106.2; 107.3; 109.1; 109.2; 109.3; 109.5; 110.1; 110.5; 116.2; 129.1; 130.1; 130.2; 131.1; 132.3; 133.5; 136.2; 142.1; 144.3; 145.3; 150.4; 152.1; 152.3; 161.1; 166.4; 192.1; 196.2; 200.4; 201.2; 204.5; 215.2; 215.3; 222.1; 224.4; 228.4; 229.4 Popper, Karl  100.3 Poseidon 121.2 Pound, Ezra  27.3; 31.4; 47.7; 152.2; 177.1; 215.2 Poussin, Nicolas  110.4; 196.4 Powell, Mary  34.2 Praed, Winthrop Mackworth  214.4; 223.3 Praz, Mario  2.6; 6.1; 12.1; 12.2; 16.1; 17.1; 17.2; 17.3; 21; 27.3; 35.1; 35.3; 41.2; 43.3; 44.3; 50.1; 52.2; 53.2; 59.1; 64.1; 75.1; 75.5; 78.1; 108.1; 116.1; 116.3; 127.1; 134.1; 143.4; 144.1; 145.1; 145.3; 145.4; 146.1; 147.2; 158.4; 160.3; 172.1; 173.1; 185.1; 186.2; 189.3; 189.4; 192.4; 196.1; 200.2; 206.1; 206.2; 208.1; 214.4; 224.1; 225.2; 226.1 Press, John  11.2; 11.3 Price, Richard 170.1 Prickett, Stephen  173.4 Priestley, Joseph  112.2; 170.1; 175.1; 226.2

Index of names Prior, Matthew  28.2; 71.5; 72.3; 77; 78.2; 81.1 Prometheus  31.4; 145.3; 176.4; 189.1; 191.3; 191.4; 197.1; 212.1; 212.2 Propertius, Sextus  129.4 Proust, Marcel  42.1; 225.3 Prynne, William  46.1; 56.5 Pulci, Luigi  203.3; 205.2 Punter, David  125.4; 142.2; 145.1 Purcell, Henry  51.2; 51.5; 56.2 Purchas, Samuel  7.1 Pushkin, Alexander  58.1; 189.2 Pym, John  1.5 Pythagoras 67 Quarles, Francis 21; 23.3; 56.5; 69.2; 110.3 Quintana, Ricardo  92.1; 92.2; 93.5 Rabelais, François  44.2; 62.3; 206.1; 229.1 Racine, Jean  46.1 Radcliffe, Ann Ward  112.4; 120.1; 143; 144.1; 145.3; 161.1; 161.2; 166.1; 168.3; 175.1; 191.5; 200.2; 200.4; 205.5; 210.2 Radcliffe, William  143.1 Ralegh (or Raleigh), Sir Walter  1.3; 9.1; 22; 139.1 Ramsay, Allan  148.1; 154.2; 154.3 Rank, Otto  58.2 Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio)  110.5; 130.2 Rawson, Claude  56.1; 73.7; 92.1 Ray, John  45.1 Reade, Charles  170.3; 231.1 Redi, Francesco  228.2 Reeve, Clara 145.2; 215.3 Reeves, Anne  47.1 Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn  226.1 Reni, Guido  130.2 Renwick, William Lindsay  168.3 Renzulli, Michele  189.4 Reynolds, John Hamilton  223.1; 223.2

627/II Reynolds, Joshua  73.1; 73.6; 110.5; 112.2; 112.3; 133.2; 157.1; 174.1 Reynolds, Myra  105.1 Rich, John  78.4 Richard I, King of England  210.1; 211.6 Richard III, King of England  41.1; 142.1 Richardson, Ralph  141.2 Richardson, Samuel  9.1; 71.2; 71.3; 71.5; 96.3; 109.2; 114.1; 116–20; 121.2; 121.3; 121.4; 121.6; 123.3; 123.4; 123.7; 124.1; 125.1; 125.2; 136.2; 140.2; 143.1; 145.2; 145.4; 156; 159.2; 161.1; 163.2; 165.1; 170.2; 170.3; 208.3; 222.1 Richter, Jean Paul  225.2 Rickey, Mary Ellen  13.2 Ricks, Christopher  127.4 Riem, Antonella  183.3 Ripa, Cesare  10.2 Rizzardi, Alfredo  19.2 Robertson, William 138 Robespierre, Maximilien  146.3; 169; 214.2 Robin Hood  170.3; 210.2; 229.3 Robinson, Edwin Arlington  152.2 Robinson, Mary 157.1; 222.1 Robsart, Amy  211.2 Rochester, Earl of ( John Wilmot)  45.1; 47.3; 51.2; 52.1; 53.1; 54.1; 54.4; 61; 63.2; 64.2; 71.2; 75.2 Roe, Nicholas  195.1 Roger L’Estrange  1.8; 73.2 Rogers, Samuel  152.2; 201.2; 214.4; 216.2; 217 Rognoni, Francesco  189.1; 189.2; 189.4; 191.5; 192.2 Romani, Felice  211.3 Romney, George  73.6; 150.1 Rosa, Salvator  143.1; 143.4 Rosenfeld, Sybil  54.1 Rosimond (Claude de La Rose)  58.1 Ross, Angus  119.1

628/II Ross, Josephine  19.2 Rossetti, Christina  12.1; 12.2; 106.3; 106.5; 145.3; 150.4; 155.1; 198.2; 209.2; 220.1 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel  17.5; 149.2; 151.2; 155.1; 173.1; 195.4; 200.3; 215.1 Rossetti, William Michael  106.3; 106.5; 173.3; 173.4; 198.2; 213.1; 216.1; 216.2 Rossi, Properzia  222.3 Rossini, Gioacchino  158.7; 206.1 Roth, Joseph  151.1 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  112.2; 134.2; 137.2; 146.3; 156; 158.2; 166.1; 168.1; 177.4; 193.1; 193.2 Rousset, Jean  205.3 Rowe, Elizabeth Singer  71.5 Rowe, Nicholas  79; 119.2; 140.2 Rubens, Peter Paul  16.1; 106.2 Ruggieri Punzo, Franca  206.1 Runciman, David  68.1 Ruskin, John  2.3; 12.1; 30.2; 43.4; 66.3; 86; 89.3; 112.3; 133.3; 166.1; 173.4; 190.3; 206.3; 214.4; 220.2; 225.3; 230.2 Russell, Bertrand  41.1; 41.2; 68.3; 68.4; 100.3; 137.1; 173.1; 200.1 Ruth 199.4 Rymer, Sir Thomas  45.1 Sabbadini, Silvano  195.2; 220.2 Sacheverell, Henry  73.4 Sacheverell, Lucy  9.2 Sackville, Charles, 6th Earl of Dorset and 1st Earl of Middlesex 61.1; 63.2; 77.1 Sackville, Thomas  61.1 Sade, Marquis de (Donatien Alphonse François de)  145.1 St Anthony of Padua  144.1 St Augustine of Hippo  20 St Bonaventure  2.4; 20 St Catherine  50.2

Index of names St Cecilia  51.5 St Clare  119.3 St Dorothy  50.2 St Francis of Sales  2.4; 12.3 St Ignatius of Loyola  20; 63.2; 139.3 St John the Baptist  38.2; 51.3; 177.2 St John the Evangelist  123.3 St Joseph  123.4; 183.3 St Joseph of Arimathea  185.4 St Michael  204.5 St Paul  37.3; 123.3; 139.2 St Paulinus of Nola, bishop  18.3 St Peter  32.5; 139.2; 185.4; 204.5 St Simeon the Stylite  139.3 St Teresa of Ávila  16.2; 16.3; 17.4; 17.5 St Thomas of Aquinas  123.3 St-Réal, César Vichard de  53.4 Saintsbury, George  16.2; 23.1; 35.2; 41.3; 43.1; 46.2; 47.7; 53.2; 57.1; 74.2; 100.4; 109.2; 130.1; 135.2; 138; 146.2; 160.1; 173.4; 214.1; 214.4; 215.2; 226.1 Salandra, Serafino della  35.1 Salgari, Emilio  168.5 Salomon 77.3 Salt, Sir Samuel  224.3 Salter, Keith W.  19.2; 19.3 Sambrook, James  73.4 Sampietro, Luigi  42.2 Sancroft, William, Archbishop of Canterbury  1.10; 71.3 Sanderson, Robert, bishop  44.4 Sandys, George  27.2; 196.4 Sanesi, Roberto  173.1 Samson 39 Sappho  157.1; 222.4 Sarpi, Paolo  65.1 Satan  7.2; 17.2; 31.4; 32.3; 35.1; 35.3; 35.4; 35.5; 35.6; 35.7; 36.1; 36.2; 37.1; 37.2; 37.3; 38.1; 38.2; 38.3; 42.1; 70.1; 75.3; 82.1; 116.2; 117.4; 144.3; 145.3;

Index of names 145.4; 155.4; 172.3; 174.2; 174.3; 176.4; 177.2; 191.4; 197.1; 204.4; 204.5; 212.3 Saumaise, Claude (Salmasio)  34.2 Saussure, Ferdinand de  73.4 Savage, Richard  132.2; 132.3 Savonarola, Girolamo  139.1 Scarlatti, Domenico  11.2 Scarron, Paul  45.2; 62.3; 121.2 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph  26.6; 183.2 Schiavonetti, Louis  173.1 Schiller, Friedrich  147.2; 158.2; 188.1; 200.2; 204.4 Schlegel, August Wilhelm  188.4 Schorer, Mark  85.1 Schubert, Franz  150.1 Schumann, Robert  204.1 Schwob, Marcel  134.1 Scott, Walter  9.1; 47.7; 49.2; 72.3; 89.1; 123.5; 143.1; 148.1; 148.2; 152.2; 154.2; 155.1; 156; 158.2; 158.5; 158.7; 160.1; 161.2; 166.1; 166.3; 166.4; 167; 168.1; 203.2; 205.2; 206–11; 212.3; 214.1; 216.1; 222.1; 223.1; 229.1; 229.3 Scotus, Johannes Duns  76.3 Scupoli, Lorenzo  2.4 Sedley, Sir Charles  45.1; 54.1; 61.1; 63.2 Selden, John  44.1; 62.2; 63.1 Selkirk, Alexander  83.1 Sempill, Robert  172.2 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus  44.4; 46.1 Serpieri, Alessandro  183.3; 185.3 Sertoli, Giuseppe  73.7; 82.2; 91.3; 93.5; 127.4; 127.5; 128.1; 132.3 Sestito, Marisa  52.1 Settle, Elkanah  47.3; 51.2 Severn, Joseph  195.2 Seward, Anna 222.1 Shadwell, Thomas  25.3; 46.2; 51.2; 51.3; 53.3; 57–8; 60.4; 61.1; 115.3; 205.2; 211.4

629/II Shaftesbury, 1st Earl of (Anthony AshleyCooper)  1.9; 51.2; 53.4; 68.4; 99; 103 Shaftesbury, 3rd Earl of (Anthony AshleyCooper)  73.4; 89.4; 99; 100.2; 102; 109.5; 156 Shakespeare, William  2.5; 2.6; 3; 7.1; 25.4; 26.6; 27.2; 29.3; 31.4; 32.4; 34.1; 35.3; 37.1; 41.1; 41.3; 42.1; 42.4; 44.3; 45.1; 46.1; 46.2; 47.2; 47.4; 47.5; 49.2; 50.1; 50.3; 53.1; 53.2; 53.4; 53.5; 54.1; 54.2; 55.6; 56.1; 56.5; 57.1; 58.2; 60.2; 60.3; 65.2; 65.4; 71.2; 73.5; 74.1; 75.3; 76.3; 79; 83.1; 96.4; 110.5; 114.3; 115.3; 119.2; 120.1; 123.2; 123.7; 126.2; 128.4; 129.6; 129.7; 130.2; 132.1; 133.1; 133.3; 133.4; 140.1; 140.2; 141.2; 141.3; 141.4; 141.5; 142.2; 142.4; 143.4; 143.6; 145.1; 156; 160.4; 161.1; 161.3; 162.2; 168.3; 170.2; 173.1; 175.3; 176.2; 176.3; 177.3; 179; 180.3; 185.4; 186.2; 188.1; 188.3; 188.4; 190.1; 191.5; 194.2; 195.3; 202.3; 204.1; 204.4; 205.4; 205.5; 206.1; 206.2; 207; 208.3; 209.2; 210.1; 211.1; 211.4; 214.2; 215.3; 220.1; 224.1; 224.2; 224.4; 226.2; 228.4; 229.1; 229.4 Shaw, George Bernard  47.4; 102; 121.1; 189.4 Shawcross, John T.  32.2 Sheely, Mary  145.1 Sheffield, Lord (John Baker Holroyd)  139.1 Sheil, Richard Lalor 231.2 Shelburne, Earl of (William Petty)  157.1 Shelley, Elizabeth  190.3 Shelley, Harriet see Westbrook, Harriet Shelley, Mary  166.1; 171.1; 189.1; 189.2; 189.3; 190.3; 191.4; 193.1; 204.1; 212; 213.1; 220.1

630/II Shelley, Percy Bysshe  6.1; 16.2; 26.4; 31.4; 53.2; 55.2; 73.2; 105.1; 110.2; 132.4; 145.1; 158.3; 158.4; 158.7; 160.3; 162.3; 168.4; 170.3; 173.3; 183.3; 189–94; 195.1; 195.2; 196.1; 196.2; 196.3; 196.4; 197.1; 200.1; 200.4; 202.2; 202.3; 203.1; 203.3; 204.1; 205.1; 212.1; 212.2; 212.4; 214.1; 214.2; 215.1; 215.2; 217; 220.1; 222.3; 222.4; 223.2; 224.1; 225.1; 225.3; 228.1; 228.2; 228.3; 229.1; 229.2; 229.4; 231.2 Shelley, Percy Florence  212.4 Shelley, Sir Timothy  212.4 Shelvocke, George  185.1 Shenstone, William 110.4; 110.5; 148.2 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley  121.3; 140.1; 141; 144.1; 145.3; 146.1; 157.1; 159.2 Sherwood, Terry Grey  12.3 Shillito, Arthur Richard  42.4 Shirley, James  46.1; 46.2; 49.1; 54.1; 54.2; 54.4; 140.3 Siddons, Sarah  141.2 Sidney, Algernon  1.1 Sidney, Sir Philip  2.2; 3; 5.1; 5.2; 9.1; 21; 23.1; 27.2; 35.3; 44.2; 46.1; 66.2; 82.2; 89.3; 97.3; 97; 106.4; 116.2; 123.2; 189.1 Sigworth, Oliver F.  130.1 Simon, Richard  51.4 Simpson, David  173.3 Simpson, Habbie  172.2 Sitwell, Edith  74.2 Skeat, Walter William  149.2 Skelton, John  62.3 Shklovsky, Viktor Borisovich  127.7 Slater, Charles Montagu  152.3 Smart, Christopher  111.2; 151; 152.1; 152.2; 154.3 Smith, Adam  102; 112.2; 137.1; 190.1 Smith, Alexander  43.1; 98.2; 224.1

Index of names Smith, Charlotte  145.2; 157.1; 168.3; 184.1; 222.3 Smith, Horace  191.3 Smith, James Cruickshank  4.2; 35.2; 38.2; 152.3; 155.1 Smith, John  2.7 Smith, Sydney  218.2; 227 Smollett, Tobias  59.1; 110.2; 116.1; 119.1; 121.2; 121.3; 123.7; 125–6; 131.2; 135.1; 141.3; 154.1; 159.2; 167; 200.4; 208.2; 208.3 Socrates  67; 195.3; 199.4 Sophocles 130.3 Southerne, Thomas 52.1; 52.2 Southey, Robert  42.2; 150.1; 158.4; 158.5; 173.1; 178.4; 183.4; 184.1; 188.3; 189.2; 190.1; 194.1; 200.3; 201.2; 204.5; 214; 215.1; 215.2; 215.3; 218.2; 224.1; 226.2; 227; 228.3; 229.2 Southwell, Robert  2.4; 16.3 Spark, Muriel  155.2 Spears, Monroe Kirklyndorf  77.2 Speght, Thomas  149.2 Spence, Thomas  157.1 Spenser, Edmund  2.1; 3; 5.2; 6.1; 7.1; 7.2; 8.2; 17.3; 23.3; 29.3; 31.1; 31.2; 35.1; 35.3; 40.1; 62.1; 62.3; 63.2; 66.2; 69.2; 106.2; 106.4; 107.3; 108.2; 109.4; 110.1; 110.4; 110.5; 113.2; 123.2; 126.2; 129.2; 130.3; 133.5; 142.2; 149.2; 166.1; 189.1; 189.3; 190.1; 190.3; 196.1; 196.2; 207; 210.2; 214.2; 216.1; 223.1; 228.2; 229.1 Sperry, Stuart M.  189.4 Spinoza, Baruch  158.3 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty  178.1 Sprat, Thomas  23.1; 50.3; 82.2 Staël, Anne-Louise Germaine Necker de  139.1; 166.1; 222.3 Starobinski, Jean  42.1; 42.3 Starr, Herbert Willmarth  129.6

Index of names Statius, Publius Papinius  129.4 Steele, Richard  73.3; 73.5; 76.3; 79; 82.1; 89.3; 96.1; 97–8; 100.1; 102; 106.5; 118.3; 121.1 Steinbeck, John  172.1 Stendhal (pseud. of Marie-Henry Beyle)  157.2; 203.1 Stephen, Leslie  73.7 Sterne, Laurence  2.5; 15.1; 42.2; 65.3; 80; 96.3; 112.4; 113.1; 125.1; 125.3; 125.4; 127–8; 141.3; 148.2; 177.1; 188.2; 200.4; 205.1; 206.2; 208.2; 217; 224.1; 225.3 Stevenson, John  218.1 Stevenson, Robert Louis  134.2; 155.2; 170.2; 206.1; 209.1 Stillingfleet, Edward  68.4 Stoker, Bram  213.1 Stone, Jerome  147.2 Stone, Lawrence  1.1; 1.5 Strachan, John  228.2 Strachey, Lytton  41.2; 134.1; 220.1 Strada, Famiano  17.2 Strafford, Earl of (Thomas Wentworth)  8.1 Suckling, Sir John  2.2; 8; 9.1; 9.2; 10.2; 10.3; 40.1; 54.1; 56.5; 215.2 Sulla, Lucius Cornelius  53.3 Sullivan, Arthur  218.1 Summers, Montague  71.2 Sunderland, Earl of (Charles Spencer)  72.4 Sutherland, John  52.1; 63.2; 67; 71.2 Swedenborg, Emanuel  112.1; 174.1; 174.4; 175.1; 176.3 Swift, Graham  44.4 Swift, Jonathan  11.2; 18.2; 42.1; 45.1; 55.1; 56.2; 62.4; 64.2; 67; 71.2; 71.4; 72.4; 73.1; 73.2; 73.3; 73.5; 74.4; 76.3; 78.1; 78.4; 80; 81.2; 89–95; 96.3; 97.1; 97.2; 98.2; 99; 100.1; 100.4; 102; 106.2; 107.2; 110.5; 113.1; 119.1; 122; 125.4; 126.3; 128.1; 131.1;

631/II 132.2; 132.4; 141.1; 152.3; 175.1; 192.2; 207; 227; 229.1 Swinburne, Algernon Charles  11.3; 17.3; 52.2; 56.1; 130.1; 130.2; 147.1; 188.1; 195.4; 215.2; 215.3; 220.1 Sylvester, Joshua  7.1 Symons, Arthur  173.4; 219.2; 220.1 Synge, John Millington  204.4 Tacitus, Publius Cornelius  18.2 Tagliaferri, Aldo  173.4 Taine, Hippolyte  11.2; 31.1; 31.4; 35.7; 41.2; 47.4; 47.6; 47.7; 50.3; 55.1; 55.2; 61.3; 74.2; 76.1; 89.1; 96.1; 106.2; 116.1; 116.3; 127.1; 138; 150.1; 206.1; 226.1 Talbot, Lord (Charles Talbot)  106.1 Tanner, Tony  161.3 Tasso, Torquato  27.2; 32.3; 34.1; 35.1; 35.3; 47.5; 129.4; 130.3; 191.3; 203.3; 214.2 Tassoni, Alessandro  75.3 Tate, Nahum  51.2 Taylor, Jeremy  29.1; 29.3; 40.2 Taylor, John  219.1 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich  204.1 Temple, Sir William  45.1; 67; 71.1; 75.1; 89.3; 90.1; 94.1 Tennant, William  205.2 Tennyson, Alfred  15.2; 35.2; 71.3; 101.3; 107.3; 119.2; 145.1; 178.4; 195.4; 216.1; 217; 220.2; 223.1 Terence (Publius Terentius Afer)  55.4; 57.3; 61.1; 97.4 Tertullian  43.3; 139.2 Thackeray, William Makepeace  1.11; 43.1; 59.3; 77.2; 89.1; 96.1; 97.1; 123.7; 124.1; 136.3; 157.2; 164; 166.1; 206.2; 210.2; 212.2; 224.1; 224.3; 229.1 Thales 132.3 Theobald, Lewis  75.5; 76.3 Theocritus  34.1; 48.1 Theodosius I, Roman Emperor  52.1

632/II Theseus  78.3; 222.3 Thomas, Dylan  10.3; 10.4; 12.2; 18.2; 19.2; 26.2; 127.5; 173.4; 176.1; 181.2; 192.2; 219.1 Thomas, Edward  108.1; 136.4 Thompson, Edward Palmer  174.3; 230.2 Thompson, Francis  16.2; 17.3; 74.2; 109.2; 109.4; 176.1 Thomson, George  172.2 Thomson, James (The Seasons)  73.3; 105.1; 106; 108.1; 108.2; 110.4; 112.4; 113.4; 130.1; 130.2; 146.1; 150.4; 161.1 Thoreau, Henry David  21 Thorn Drury, George  27.2 Thrale, Henry  133.2; 159.2 Thrale, Hester  133.2; 143.4; 159.2 Thucydides  68.1; 229.4 Tickell, Thomas  75.5; 96.3 Tieck, Ludwig  158.2; 220.1 Tilenus, Daniel  15.1 Tillotson, Geoffrey  224.3 Tillotson, John  72.2; 106.2 Tillyard, Eustace Mandeville Wetenhall  35.5 Timothy 215.3 Tindal, Matthew 104 Tindall, William York  69.1; 69.2; 69.3; 70.1 Tintoretto, Jacopo  112.3 Tirso de Molina  205.2; 205.3 Titian  110.5; 112.3; 196.1; 196.4 Todd, Janet  71.2 Toland, John  45.1; 104 Tolstoy, Leo  89.2 Tomasi di Lampedusa, Giuseppe  200.2; 201.1; 205.1; 206.1 Tommaseo, Niccolò  133.3; 200.3 Tone, Wolfe  111.4; 166.1 Tooke, William  131.1 Townshend, Aurelian 40.1 Traherne, Philip  19.1

Index of names Traherne, Thomas  12.1; 18.2; 19–20; 25.1; 26.3; 29.3; 42.1; 43.2; 44.4; 65.1; 96.3; 146.3 Trevelyan, George Macaulay  157.2 Trilling, Lionel  160.5; 162.2 Tristram  37.2; 127.7 Troide, Lars  159.1 Trollope, Anthony  110.4; 115.1; 150.3; 152.1; 167; 203.2; 206.2; 209.2 Tuke, Sir Samuel  65.3 Turgenev, Ivan  166.1 Turner, William  123.1; 158.7; 206.2; 217 Tuve, Rosemond  2.2; 2.4; 12.2 Tuveson, Ernest  89.1; 93.5 Twain, Mark  160.5 Tyndale, William  30.1 Ulysses  5.1; 35.3; 93.5; 207 Ungaretti, Giuseppe  176.2 Urquhart, Thomas 44.2 Utter, Robert Palfrey  116.2 Vafflard, Pierre-Auguste  109.2 Valdesso, Giovanni  12.3 Valéry, Paul  133.2 Vallon, Annette  178.1; 181.1 Van Dyke (or Van Dyck), Anthony  10.1 Van Gogh, Vincent  112.3; 226.1 Vanbrugh, John 59; 60.2; 60.3; 60.4; 73.6; 96.3 Vanhomrigh, Esther  94.1 Vasari, Giorgio  142.3 Vaughan, Henry  2.4; 12.1; 18; 19.1; 19.2; 21; 40.2; 42.1; 96.3; 146.3; 181.3 Vaughan, Thomas  18.2 Venus  17.3; 32.4; 77.3; 121.2; 196.4 Verdi, Giuseppe  158.7; 200.2; 203.2 Verga, Giovanni  167 Veronese, Paolo  112.3 Verri, Pietro  98.1 Vesalio, Andrea  41.2

Index of names Vico, Giambattista  47.3; 123.3; 158.2 Vieth, David M.  61.1; 61.2; 61.3 Villeneuve, Pierre Charles Jean Baptiste Sylvestre 157.2 Virgil (Publius Virgilius Maro)  11.1; 23.3; 28.1; 28.2; 35.1; 35.3; 37.2; 40.1; 47.3; 47.4; 47.5; 48.1; 62.1; 73.1; 75.2; 75.3; 75.5; 106.2; 108.1; 139.1; 174.1; 205.3; 214.3; 229.4 Virgin Mary, the  16.3; 17.3; 35.6; 38.2; 123.4; 145.3; 174.1; 174.3; 187.2 Visser, Colin  52.1 Vitruvius (Marcus Vitruvius Pollio) 73.6 Vivaldi, Antonio  106.2; 143.4 Viviani, Teresa  192.4 Voiture, Vincent  75.3 Volney, comte de (Constantin François de Chassebœuf )  174.4; 212.3 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet)  41.1; 56.2; 62.1; 113.3; 116.2; 126.1; 126.2; 134.2; 138; 142.4; 229.1 Wagner, Richard  191.3; 194.2 Walker, Keith  61.1 Wallace, Sir William  172.4 Waller, Edmund  1.5; 2.1; 4.2; 25.6; 26.6; 27; 28.2; 41.2; 46.2; 48.1; 54.1; 54.4; 56.5; 77.1 Wallis, Henry  149.2 Walpole, Horace  73.6; 112.4; 129.1; 129.2; 129.4; 129.5; 142; 144.1; 145.2; 149.1; 191.5; 204.1; 205.5; 208.1; 210.2 Walpole, Robert  72.2; 72.4; 76.3; 78.1; 78.4; 78.5; 81.1; 95.1; 100.1; 110.2; 111.3; 121.1; 128.1; 136.3; 142.1 Walsh, Marcus  151.2 Walsh, William  74.2; 75.2 Walton, Izaak  12.1; 13.1; 44.1; 44.3; 44.4; 57.1; 67 Warburton, William  76.3

633/II Ward, Aileen  174.1 Ward, William C.  6.1; 53.2 Waring, Jane  89.3; 94.1 Warner, John M.  126.2 Warton, Joseph  35.1; 109.3; 110.2; 110.4; 110.5; 130.1; 130.3 Warton, Thomas  110.4; 110.5; 130.1 Washington, George  169 Wasserman, Earl Reeves  196.4; 198.2 Watson, James  148.1; 154.2 Watt, Ian  73.5; 73.7; 82.2; 114.1; 116.2; 116.3; 119.2 Watt, James  73.4 Watteau, Jean-Antoine  77.2 Watts, Isaac  71.5; 112.4 Waugh, Evelyn  61.1; 129.2 Weber, Max  82.2 Webster, John  3; 52.1; 71.2; 143.1; 145.1; 191.5 Wellek, René  100.4; 158.1; 183.2; 194.2; 224.1; 226.2 Wellington, 1st Earl of (Arthur Wellesley)  1.7; 157.2 Wells, Herbert George  44.4; 93.5 Wentworth, Thomas, Earl of Strafford  1.5 Wesker, Arnold  210.1 Wesley, Charles 153 Wesley, John 12.3; 19.2; 73.4; 103; 111.2; 112.4; 153; 157.1; 162.2; 214.4; 221 West, Richard  129.1; 129.6 Westbrook, Harriet  189.2; 189.4; 190.1; 190.3; 192.4; 212.1 Wheatley, Henry Benjamin  66.1 White, Gilbert 136.4 White, Keith D.  195.1 Whitefield, George 153 Whitman, Walt  19.2; 151.2 Whitney, Geoffrey  21 Wild, Jonathan  78.5; 122 Wilde, Jane  222.3

634/II Wilde, Oscar  46.1; 56.1; 113.1; 115.3; 141.1; 141.2; 142.3; 144.1; 144.2; 145.4; 166.3; 166.4; 200.2 Wilkes, John  131.1; 131.2; 132.2; 135.1; 135.2; 204.5 Wilkes (or Wilks), Robert  60.4; 111.3 Wilkie, David  158.7; 206.1 Wilkinson, John  111.2 William I, the Conqueror  142.3; 157.2; 201.1; 208.5 William III of Orange, King of England, Scotland and Ireland  1.9; 1.10; 1.11; 46.2; 47.3; 59.1; 61.1; 64.2; 67; 68.4; 72.1; 72.3; 77.1; 77.3; 82.1; 82.2; 105.2; 140.2; 157.2; 208.5; 209.3 William Alexander, 1st Earl of Stirling  3 Williams, Helen Maria 222.1 Williams, John  178.1 Williamson, Karina  151.2 Wilson, John  155.1 Wilson, Richard  73.6 Winchilsea, Lady (Anne Finch)  1.11; 71.5; 78.1; 105; 112.4; 222.2 Winn, James Anderson  47.1 Wiseman, Nicholas Patrick Stephen, Cardinal 22 Witemeyer, Hugh  27.3 Wither, George  3; 4; 5.1; 8.1; 21; 69.2 Withington, Eleanor  24 Wittgenstein, Ludwig  47.3 Wollstonecraft, Mary  159.3; 168.2; 170.1; 170.3; 171; 176.4; 179; 212.1 Wolsey, Thomas  132.3 Wood, William  91.3 Woodman, Ross  132.4 Woolf, Virginia  40.2; 71.1; 71.2; 82.2; 96.1; 105.1; 105.2; 119.3; 127.2; 159.1; 162.2; 164; 165.1; 171.2; 189.4; 206.1; 224.4; 225.2; 226.1; 226.2 Woolston, Thomas 104 Wordsworth, Dorothy  178.1; 180.1; 180.3; 181.1; 184.1; 185.3

Index of names Wordsworth, William  4.2; 18.3; 19.2; 19.3; 28.2; 44.4; 48.1; 73.1; 105.1; 106.5; 108.1; 110.2; 110.5; 113.5; 129.3; 143.3; 148.2; 149.2; 150.3; 152.1; 154.1; 155.1; 158.3; 158.4; 158.6; 158.7; 160.3; 170.1; 172.1; 173.4; 178–82; 183.1; 183.3; 183.4; 184.1; 185.1; 185.2; 185.3; 186.3; 188.1; 188.2; 188.3; 189.1; 189.2; 190.2; 190.3; 192.2; 192.3; 192.4; 194.1; 194.2; 195.1; 195.3; 196.3; 200.2; 200.4; 201.2; 202.1; 202.2; 202.3; 214.4; 215.1; 216.2; 217; 219.1; 220.1; 221; 222.3; 222.4; 223.2; 223.3; 224.1; 225.1; 226.2; 228.2; 228.3; 229.2; 229.4; 231.2 Wotton, Sir Henry  44.4 Wotton, William  67; 90.1 Wren, Sir Christopher  1.9; 2.7; 45.2; 46.1; 66.2; 73.6 Wright of Derby, Joseph  73.6; 112.3 Wyatt, Thomas  10.1 Wycherley, William  54.1; 55; 56.1; 56.2; 56.5; 57.1; 59.2; 61.1; 69.1; 75.1; 88.1; 140.1; 141.4 Wyclif (or Wycliffe), John  30.1 Wylie, Georgiana  196.2 Wyndham, Sir William  81.1 Xenophon 127.7 Xerxes, King of Persia and Egypt  132.3 Yearsley, Ann 222.1 Yeats, William Butler  18.2; 30.2; 43.1; 93.5; 100.4; 147.2; 173.4; 189.3; 189.4; 204.4; 215.2 Young, Edward  51.2; 89.1; 105.1; 109; 110.3; 110.4; 112.4; 132.4; 150.4; 158.2; 173.1; 177.2 Zanco, Aurelio  109.2 Zeus see Jove Zola, Émile  119.1 Zuccato, Edoardo  200.3

Thematic index

absolutism  1; 1.3; 1.4; 1.5; 1.8; 34.2; 68.2; 68.3; 190 acrostics  12.3; 176.2 America American colonies  30.2; 87; 111.3; 135; 157 American War of Independence see wars animals  78; 93; 93.2; 150.4; 151.4; 172.4; 219.2 bestiaries 9.2 anti-slavery or abolitionism  71.2; 145.3; 150.3; 150.4; 157; 160.3; 181; 190.3; 216.2; 222 aphorisms  11.4; 19.3; 21; 44.3; 56.5; 76; 129.3; 130.2; 132.4; 142.2; 146.2; 158.3; 175; 176.3; 178; 199.3; 227; 229.2 architecture Baroque 59 Gothic  73.6; 110.5; 142.2; 144; 158.7 Palladian  45.2; 73.6 of theatres  46; 231.2 archives and collections  5; 43.4; 44; 44.3; 128.4; 142.3; 208.4 arts ‘conversation piece’  73.6 engraving  173; 174; 175.2; 176; 195.2 landscape painting  73.6; 108 painting  73.6; 112.2; 112.3; 119.1; 123; 127; 130.2; 143.4; 146; 158.7; 173; 226.2 atheism  2; 68.2; 100.2; 112.2; 129.2; 184.3; 189; 189.4; 190

Augustan age, literature, art, philosophy  2; 23; 28; 28.2; 41; 48; 73; 73.7; 77; 89.4; 105; 106.2; 109; 131; 136.2; 139 anti-Augustan stances  110; 130; 142; 183.3 Augustan poetry see poetry neo-Augustan writers  228.2 post-Augustan poems  196.2 Authorized Version see Bible ballads  23.3; 148.2; 158.5; 172.3; 185.2; 207; 214.4; 223 Baroque  2; 2.5; 2.6; 16; 50; 53.3; 59; 108.2 anti-Baroque  41.2; 61.3 neo-Baroque  16.2; 109; 109.4; 130.2; 176 bathos  5.2; 9.2; 12; 43.4; 51.3; 62.3; 76.3; 14.3; 127.6; 144.3; 177.4; 182.3; 200; 202.2; 223 battles of the Boyne  1.11 of Culloden  207 of Flodden  207 of Hastings  149.2 of Marston Moor  1.6 of Preston  208.2 of Talavera  225.4 of Tewkesbury  211.6 of Trafalgar  157.2 of Waterloo  157.2; 202.2 beverages coffee  1.2; 73.2 tea  1.2; 27.2 Bible  1.7; 2.3; 2.4; 13

636/II of 1611 or Authorized Version  29.2; 30 Biedermeier  5.2; 11.2; 98.2; 158.5; 160.3; 178.4; 206; 214; 224; 228.3 bourgeoisie  1.5; 1.8; 56.3; 57; 59; 72; 73.3; 114; 116.3; 140; 160.2; 214 British Museum  19; 196 Calvinism  12.3; 70; 150; 155.2 anti-Calvinism  172.2; 183.3; 200; 214.4 satire of 90 Catholicism  1.9; 2.4; 19; 23.2; 29; 74 Anglo-Catholicism 29 anti-Catholicism  16.3; 25; 83.3; 128.3; 138; 202.2; 209 Gordon Riots  135; 146.4; 174 philo-Catholicism 1.11 circulating libraries  73.3; 141.3; 158.5; 206.2 classicism  2.5; 22; 28; 73; 112; 152 Neoclassicism  73.5; 112.4 clerical life  14 colonialism  1.2; 1.7; 72; 78.2; 93.2; 98.2; 150.3 East India Company  111.4; 157 Commonwealth  1.7; 26.3; 31; 34; 34.2; 35; 35.4 communism 1.6 pantisocracy  184; 214.2; 214.3 concettism  2; 2.6; 21; 23.3; 24 anti-concettism 23.3 ‘Clevelandisms’ 24 concettist poets  15.2 Congress of Vienna  157; 157.3 conspiracies and plots  1.3; 1.11; 27; 41.2; 46; 53.3 of Cato Street  157.3 Gunpowder Plot  1.3; 7.2; 16.3 of Titus Oates  1.9; 51.2; 211.4 Counter-Reformation  2.4; 2.5; 21 Decadence  6; 23.2; 38.2; 42; 134.2; 142; 194; 200.2; 220

Thematic index deism  15.2; 45; 72.2; 73.4; 89.4; 91.2; 103; 104; 169; 190 Dissent and Dissenters  1.2; 1.8; 1.9; 69; 71.3; 82; 158.6; 222 Antinomianism 174.3 Methodism  72.2; 73.4; 103; 153; 155.2 Unitarianism 183.3 divine right of kings  1; 1.3; 1.10; 73.4; 82; 142.4 doppelganger  141.2; 141.5; 155.2 economy capitalism  102; 157; 176 division of labour  72 enclosures  72; 111; 113.4 Industrial Revolution  72; 111.2; 112; 219 Ludditism  157; 157.3; 200.3; 202 Malthus’s theories  157; 192.2 repeal of Corn Laws  157; 157.3 ekphrasis  106.4; 143; 195.2; 196.4; 222.4 England Anglomania  73.4; 147 Bank of  72 felix  18.2 history of  126; 137.2; 147 English language birth of  210 dictionary of  132.3 Enlightenment  73; 112; 171.2; 193 anti-Enlightenment 185 rationalism 126.2 epigrams  3; 5; 11.4; 17.4; 21; 44.2; 110.2; epigrammatic tradition  11.3; 17 sacred 16.3 escapism  11.3; 196.2; 229.3 estrangement and Verfremdung  89.5; 92.3; 155.3; 190.3 Euphuism  2.6; 30.2 fables didactic 18.3

Thematic index Mandeville’s 102 oneiric and fantastic  192 fairy-tale, genre  78.2; 105.2; 166 fantastic, genre  123; 187.2; 198 Faustism  82; 145; 155.4; 204 fideism  2; 97 folklore  11.2; 148.2; 172; 198 freedom of religion  1.4; 1.5; 1.6; 1.8; 1.9; 1.11; 111.3 Covenant and Covenanters  1.5; 1.7; 72.3; 206.3; 208.5 Test Act  89.3; 157.3 Toleration Act  72.2 French Revolution  73; 111; 139; 146.3; 157; 157.2; 159.3; 169; 171; 178; 184; 189.3; 222; 226.2; 228 genius loci  192; 213 gentleman, ethos or figure of  66.2; 82.3; 87; 96.3; 98.2; 118.2 gentry  1.5; 1.6 Glorious Revolution  1.11; 72; 73.4; 142.4; 208.5; 209.3 Gothic aesthetics 146 architecture see architecture as a conceptual category  142.2 motifs  33; 191.5; 220 neo-Gothic  73; 82; 142 novel see novel Great Fire of London  1.2; 1.9; 48.2; 66 Great Remonstrance  1.5 Habeas Corpus  1.9; 135 hymnography  112.4; 150.4; 151.2; 192 Lobgesang 151.2 martyrdom 17.3 imagination  2; 23; 110.2; 173.3; 194.2 and fancy 183.3; 228.3; 228.4 Locke’s 73.4

637/II vs rationalism 158.3; 174.2 inscape  100.4 Ireland colonialism in  113 emancipation of  141.2; 146.3; 190 Irish ethnicity  113; 127; 166 Union Act  157; 166 ‘Ironsides’ 1.6 irony  89.2; 89.4 Italy Italophobia 126 as a literary subject  96.2; 113.4; 126; 143.3; 143.4; 143.5; 212.4; 217 travels in  96.2; 106; 107.2; 108; 125; 129; 136; 144; 189.2; 191; 192; 208; 228 Jesuits anti-Jesuitism  7.2; 63.2 iconology 21 Ignatian meditation  12.3; 20; 139.3 journals, journalism, periodicals  73; 82; 97; 113; 156; 158.5; 169 Adventurer 133 Anti-Jacobin  146.4; 201.2; 214.2 Bee 113.3 Blackwood’s Magazine  155; 228.2 Briton 126 Champion 124.3 Craftsman 81.2 Edinburgh Review  154.3; 201.2; 227 Examiner  71.4; 81.2; 89.3; 195.4; 228 Freeholder 96.3 Friend 188 Gentleman’s Magazine 132.3 Guardian  76.3; 96.3; 98; 100.4 Idler 133 Liberal  205; 228 London Magazine  223; 224.4; 225 Museum 110.2 North Briton  111.3; 131; 135 Political Register  230; 230.2

638/II Public Advertiser 135.2 Quarterly Review  158.5; 207 Rambler 133 Review 82 Spectator  96.3; 98; 113.3 Tatler  96.3; 98.2 Watchman 184 World  140.2 kennings  75.5 kitsch  12; 17.4; 142.3 libertinism and libertines  2.2; 45; 46; 54.4; 55.2; 55.3; 56.2; 58.2; 59.2; 60.2; 61.2; 71.2; 88; 116.3; 117; 118.2; 119.2; 160; 200.3; 213.2 Donjuanism  58; 119.3; 134.2; 205.2; 205.3 reformed libertine  46; 116.3; 123.5 literary theories colonial and postcolonial criticism  145.4; 166 deconstruction  183.4; 189.4; 195.2 feminist and gender criticism  73.7; 105; 116.3; 142; 143; 158.6; 160; 166; 178; 222.2 formalism  10.3; 127.7 Marxist criticism  206.4 New Historicism  158.6 psychoanalytical criticism  89; 93.5; 183.4 reader’s response criticism  110.5; 116.3 structuralism and poststructuralism  11.3; 19.2; 158.6; 199.6 literature African 157 children’s  89; 158.5 fantasy 89.5 history of  110.5; 226.2 patriotic 96.2

Thematic index popular 116.2 travel  92; 202 Machiavellianism  3; 41.2 anti-Machiavellianism 41.2 Magna Carta  28.2 Mannerism  2.5; 2.6 manuscripts Crewe 186 Folio Percy  148.2 found manuscript  129.6; 143.5; 145.2; 167; 156 Williams 13 Marinism  17; 24 Masonry 73.4 masques  3; 5; 10.2; 40; 46; 51.2 antimasques 10.2 Metaphysical poetry  2.2; 12.3; 16; 23.3; 26.5; 132.5 minimalism  11.2; 11.3 Modernism 127.2 postmodern 127.7 monologue dramatic  8.2; 26.2; 76.2 interior 13.3 music  2.6; 13; 45.2; 158.7; 172.2; 200.2; 204 Italian opera  73.6; 78.4 libretti  78.2; 206; 209.3 melodrama 145.3 myths Arthurian  195.2; 198; 207 biographical 200 Celtic 129.3 Eddic 129.7 Greek  195.2; 196.3; 197; 199.3 mythical method  205.2 mythological poetry  196.2 of the noble savage  73 Scandinavian 129.3

Thematic index National Gallery  23 nihilism 195.2 nocturnes  18.3; 158.7 nonsense  44.2; 51.3 noumenon  11.2; 199 novel, genres and historical forms antinovel 127.7 autobiographical 125.2 Bildungsroman  82.3; 125.3 of conversation  229 epistolary  71.5; 116; 117.3; 119; 120.2; 121.3; 126.2; 159.2; 209.5; 212.2 of everyday life  127; 145.2 feuilleton and popular  120.3; 145; 166 Gothic  116.2; 125.4; 142; 143; 144; 145; 189 historical  206.3; 206.4; 208; 210.2; 211.2; 211.4 humoristic 123 judicial 209.2 metafiction 127.7 novel of manners  166 omniscient narrator  121.2; 123 philosophical 218 picaresque  44.2; 121.5; 123.5; 125; 126 rise of the  73.5; 121 satirical  44.2; 229.2 Schauerroman 145 sensation  159.3; 166 sentimental  116; 124; 157 serial  120.2; 125.4 ‘silver fork’  159.2; 166 social 160 three-decker 206 thriller 155.3 Victorian 116.2 odes Horatian 25.4 metapoetic 130.3

639/II Pindaric  105.2; 129.7; 181.3 orientalism  73; 130.2; 132.4; 144; 157.2; 200.2; 200.4; 203; 204.3 pageant  10.2; 190 panegyric 11.4 pantheism  18.2; 184.3 Parliament  1.3; 1.7; 1.8; 1.9; 1.10 ‘Long’ 1.5 ‘Rump’ 1.7 ‘Short’ 1.5 parody of the Aeneid 11 of chivalry  119.3; 127.7 of comic opera  97.4 of dramatic styles and works  50.3 of Elizabethan theatre  56.3 of Faustism  144 of the Gothic  161; 229.2 of the grand tour 128 of Homeric poems  75.5; 123.2 of judicial jargon  62.3; 127.3 of medieval pseudoscience  127.3 of narrative styles and works  116; 121.3; 121.5; 123.2 of opera  78.4 parodic poetry  74.4 of pastoral tradition  61.3 of poetic styles and works  8.2; 77.2; 77.3 of Puritanism  62.3 with religious themes  13.3; 75.3; 117.4; 123.4 of romance  125.4 of Romantic poetry  191.3 of sea epos  92 of Shakespeare’s works  53.4; 56.5; 58.2; 115.3 of taxonomies  128.2 pastiche  75.3; 78.2; 223; 224.2

640/II ‘pathetic fallacy’  28.2 Peterloo massacre  157.3; 192.2; 199.6 Petition of Rights  1.4 Petrarchism anti-Petrarchism  11.2; 11.4; 95.2 Petrarchan sonnet  2.4; 157 post-Petrarchism  23.3; 25.2 picturesque  18.3; 73.6; 105; 158.2; 158.7 pietism 73.4 plague  1.2; 1.9; 4.2; 66; 86 Platonism Cambridge Platonists  2.7; 20; 40; 158.3 post-Platonism 189.3 poetry Augustan 27.2 autobiographical 158.5 conversation  184.3; 192; 196.2 country 10.2 country-house 25.2 demonic  183.3; 184.3; 185; 186; 187 epic 62 epicedia  51.5; 63.2; 78.2; 130.2; 181.2; 192.4 erotic  2; 10; 10.4; 12.3; 24 figural 2.6 intimate 112.4 ‘loco-descriptive’ 179 lyric  9.2; 10.2; 10.3; 11.3; 11.4; 13.3; 15.2; 17; 18.2; 18.3; 22; 23.3; 25.2; 25.3; 26.6; 150.4; 158.5; 175; 189; 190.3; 191; 192.4 militant 107 on nature and landscape  106.2; 106.4; 108.2; 109.4; 110.5; 112.4; 150.4; 172.4; 178 nostalgic or on memory  113.5; 150.3; 178.3; 180.3; 182.3; 182.4; 190.3 parodic see parody pastoral 5.2 pre-Romantic  18.3; 129.3 prophetic  173.2; 176; 177

Thematic index religious  2.3; 4.2; 7; 12.3; 18.3 satirical  45.2; 47.3; 150.4; 200.4 sepulchral and Ossianic  74.2; 105; 109.2; 110.3; 112.4; 126.2; 129.5; 146; 147.2; 154.3; 158.2; 175 topographical  28.2; 179; 182.3; 188.3 Victorian 195.4 poets Baroque  2.2; 16.2; 16.3; 189.4 biographies of  132.5 Caroline 2.2 Catholic  16.2; 16.3 Cavalier  9; 10; 11; 11.4; 22; 26; 119.2 court 2.2 Jacobean 2.2 ‘Lake Poets’  158.4; 178.4 Metaphysical  2.6; 6; 9.2; 23 moral 3 Satanic  158.4; 200.3 Spenserian  3; 5; 7 Pre-Raphaelites  7; 173; 195.4 progressivism 157 Prometheism 145 prose autobiographical  15; 45.2; 68; 70; 71.4; 157; 182.3; 219; 228.3 biographical  40.2; 44.3; 44.4; 64.2; 66.2; 77.2; 82; 113.3; 132.2; 133.2; 133.5; 134; 150; 159.2; 167; 170; 173.4; 212.4; 214.4; 216; 218.2; 226.2 diaries  10.3; 45.2; 65.3; 66; 89.5; 124.3 essays  2; 23.2; 226.2; 228.3 female see women historiography  45.2; 64; 226.2 homiletic  29; 44; 101; 128 satirical see satire scientific 45.2 sentimental 15 prosody heroic couplet  48; 51.4; 73.5; 95 ‘sprung rhythm’  185; 216.2; 228.4

Thematic index psyche agony 185.2 Angst 132.2 associationism  104; 127.3; 127.4; 128.4 durée (Bergson) 127.3 hypochondria  42; 73.3; 105; 126.2; 132.2 madness  89.3; 111.2; 132.2; 151; 157; 173.4; 191.2; 209.2; 219; 220.2; 224.3 melancholy  42; 105; 158.4 opium, use and abuse of  158.3; 184.4; 186; 188; 225.2; 225.3 paranoia 150 psychoanalysis 19.2 psychomachia 170.2 psychopathology of everyday life  127.2 spleen  42; 105; 110.4; 128.2; 181.3 publishing industry best-sellers 44.4 copyright 73.3 mass publishing  158.5; 222.2 subscription publishing  73.3; 75.5 Quakerism  1.6; 2.3; 45 querelle between ancients and moderns  67; 73.2; 89.4; 109; 139 Quixotism and Cervantine influence  71.4; 121.2; 121.4; 123.5; 125 Radicalism  1.8; 157; 157.2; 169; 214.2 Regency 157 relics, cult of  108.2; 142; 147.2 remakes  50.3; 53; 57; 58; 74; 75.2; 75.3; 115.3; 141.4; 190.3; 204.4; 205.2; 224.2; 228.2 Restoration  1; 2; 4.2; 8.3; 11; 22; 23; 25.2; 25.3; 25.6; 45; 48.2; 64; 121 reverie  105 rococo 77.2 Romanticism  2.2; 2.7; 6 absolute  158.3; 189.2 Aeolian harp  184.3; 188; 194.2; 195.3

641/II ‘Cockney School’  158.4; 196.4; 228.2 criticism of  158.6 cult of lakes  126.2; 158.4 dream, motif of  158.3; 199.2 English 158 epiphany 158.3 German Idealism  183.3; 188.3 Italian  109.5; 158.2 medievalism  147; 206.3 myth of genius  172.2; 175 nationalism 158.4 negative 158 organicism 158.3 post-Romanticism  145; 158.6 pre-Romanticism  6; 18.3; 73.5; 109 Romantic literary criticism  158.3; 226.2; 228.2; 228.4; 229.4 Romantic theatre  228.2; 231 romantische Ironie 158.2 symbolism  158.3; 158.6; 173.2; 189.4 tamed see Biedermeier Titanism  158.4; 174.4; 191.3; 197.2 wanderer, figure of  179; 180.2; 181.2; 181.3; 189.2; 190.2; 196.2 ‘rotten boroughs’  135 Roundheads 1.5 Royal Society  1.8; 2.7; 23.2; 23.3; 28; 30.2; 45; 93.3 sadism and masochism  145.3 salons, literary  40.2 satire  25.2; 25.3; 25.5; 25.6; 45; 62.4; 63; 107.3; 121; 192.2 economic 91.3 eighteenth-century 73.5 Horatian 76.2 Juvenalian 132.3 of literature  95 political  51; 131 in prose  89.5 of religion  90; 126.4

642/II

Thematic index

satirical drama  23.2 satirical novel see novel satirical poetry see poetry of science  57.2; 62.4; 93.3; 132.4 science as a literary subject  107; 110.2; 212; 212.2 scientism 7.2 science fiction  136 Scotland annexation to England  72.3; 106.2; 126; 154.2 Jacobitism  1.11; 72.3; 72.4; 123.5; 125.2; 206.3; 208; 209 novels of Scottish life  155 Scottish exoticism  126.2 Scottish history as a literary subject  138; 206.3 Scottish language  126.2; 154.2; 206; 208.2 Scottish national identity  147.2; 154.2; 172.2 Scottish popular traditions  130.3; 147; 154; 206.3; 208.4 Scriblerus Club  76.3; 78; 80; 81 Sehnsucht  9.2; 105; 147.2; 158.2; 164; 172.4; 177.4; 195.2; 195.3 songs  3; 4.2; 5.2; 8.2; 78.4; 148; 172.3; 207; 220.2; 229 sonnets  2.4; 3; 3.1; 5; 6.2; 7; 8.3; 12.3; 17.5 Storm and Stress  109.2; 145 stream of consciousness  25.5; 65.4; 94; 128.4 sublime, category  73.4; 146; 147.2; 154; 158.7; 212.2 supernatural  82; 142.4; 142.5; 212.2 suspension of disbelief  5.2; 43.4; 130.3; 223

domestic tragedy  140 farce 140 heroic tragedy  50 humoristic comedy  14 Jonson’s 127.4 Licensing Act  73.3; 121.3; 140; 162.2 musical 149 realistic comedy  14 re-opening of theatres  1.8; 46 Restoration  46; 50.3; 224 sentimental 73.5 vaudeville 158.5 ‘war of the theatres’  50.3 Tory, party 1.8 translations and translators  28.2; 30.2; 47.2; 47.4; 47.6; 48; 64.2; 66.2; 68; 75.5; 113; 126; 127.7; 128.2; 129.4; 147.2; 148; 150.4; 188; 189.3; 192; 203.3; 207; 218; 228.2 travel archaeological 73.6 diary  125.3; 126; 133.2; 143; 200.2 grand tours and travels in Europe  25.3; 79; 113.2; 113.4; 117.5; 128.2; 189.2; 190.3; 202; 203; 217 literature see literature sentimental journey  128.2 spas 72 tourist guides  44.3; 126; 182.2 into the underworld  93.2 walking and hiking  178; 182; 185.3 treatises political  2; 68.2 religious 2 theological  29; 44 typology of culture (Lotman)  112; 158

theatre 1642 theatre closure  1.7; 28 comedy of manners  46; 54; 121 commedia dell’arte 140

universities Leiden 102 Oxford Movement or Tractarian Movement 221

Thematic index vampirism 213 Wales Welsh ethnicity  108 Welsh koinè  19.2 Welsh language  18.2 wars American Independence  111.3 Crusades  210; 211.6 English Civil War  1.2; 1.5; 1.6; 1.7; 4.2; 6.3; 9; 18.2; 23.3; 29.3; 44; 45.2; 64; 208.6; 211.6 First World War  89; 127.3; 160.5 Napoleonic wars  157.2 Thirty Years’ War  1.4; 8 War of Greek Independence  192.4; 205 War of Spanish Succession  72.3 William of Orange’s wars  72.3 Whig, party  1.8; 1.10 witchcraft 43.4

643/II women actresses 157 ‘angel in the house’  124.2 bluestockings  73.3; 112.4; 143; 159.2 fallen  119.3; 209.2 female journalists  71.4 female novelists  136; 143; 145.2; 159.2; 160; 166; 168; 212 female parody  71.4 female playwrights  71.2; 71.4; 140.3; 231 female poetry  40.2; 105; 136; 157; 158.6; 168.3; 184; 222.2; 222.3; 222.4 female prose  71.2; 71.3; 71.5; 136 feminism  71.3; 71.5; 105; 136; 171; 171.2; 212 feminist criticism see literary theories femme fatale  26.4; 157; 187; 199.5 women’s diaries  159 women’s education  71.4; 71.5; 118.3; 166.2; 171.2; 222 women’s literary criticism  222